Handle books with editors but no authors

[ghost]

@crism commented on Sep 5, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC:

Feature Description

Now that Pressbooks has much better structured contributor support, a problem arises for edited monographs with no proper whole-work authors. PB will properly display all the contributors “below the fold,” in the “Metadata” section, but will only list the author(s) in the upper part of the page.

It should either be possible to have only editors listed as the primary work creators. Three possible approaches:

1. Allow a selection of the “primary role”—contributors with that role would be listed in the top section, with all contributors listed properly in the “Metadata” section, as currently.
2. Allow all authors to be removed, and fall back through other roles for primary creator display. (Currently, if all authors are removed, the book-owning user is reinserted as an author automatically.) If there are no authors but there are editors, list them in the upper section; if there are no editors, list the contributors; if no contributors, list the translators, etc.
3. Allow an arbitrary “credits” line—free text that would override the generated default.

The last option is redundant and unstructured, but infinitely flexible. The first option keeps structure and some flexibility, though it doesn’t handle a case with e.g. editors and a translator desired as the primary creators.

Feature Use Case

A scholarly monograph or textbook with contributions from multiple authors generally only gives the editors as the credits on the cover and title page. To publish such works in Pressbooks, we have to create a fake “author” with a name like “John Smith and Jane Doe, eds.,” which then messes up the properly-structured metadata in the lower section. It would be nice to be able to keep the structured data clean, but also have the desired display on the title page.

This issue was moved by greatislander from pressbooks/pressbooks#1341.

[ghost]

@crism commented on Sep 17, 2018, 8:44 PM UTC:

I’ve mostly addressed (and will send a PR for) the override. The “forceful” addition of an author in Pressbooks\Admin\Metaboxes::add_required_data() is clearly intentional… How disastrous would it be to drop that? Is the author set initially once, somewhere else? [Partly this is a note for my own purposes, to come back and investigate that after implementing the credit override part.]

[ghost]

@greatislander commented on Sep 18, 2018, 11:39 AM UTC:

Hi crism, thanks for your work on this. We are going to discuss and we'll get back to you; I am not sure that option 3 is my preference as it leaves a gap in terms of how the book creator (in your use case, an editor or team of editors) is attributed in metadata (see: https://schema.org/Book).

[ghost]

@crism commented on Sep 18, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC:

greatislander, I get that, and I agree… we would love to be part of those conversations. This patch suffices for our current use, but it does feel inadequate for general metadata.

[ghost]

@crism commented on Sep 18, 2018, 2:04 PM UTC:

Idea: 1) Designate primary role (editor, in this case). 2) Require primary role to be populated (as author is now). 3) Construct a default free-text credits line based on language and primary role. 4) Allow editing and/or override of credit line, used for display on title pages. 5) Use primary role for Creator when relevant.

[ghost]

@dgtracy commented on Sep 19, 2018, 8:23 PM UTC:

Hi there--I'm also on the Illinois team. I'd like to flag that we'd ideally like to be able to have other key roles, such as translator, as well as author and editor, be listable as primary roles (this is maybe implicit under option 1 above). For example in the translation we've published only the original author appears on the title page, but we'd really like to have the translator listed as well (probably in form "Translation by [name]". So this is both: expanded scope of roles that could be listed as "primary", and ability to designate more than one role/person as primary.

[SteelWagstaff]

See also #202

[SteelWagstaff]

Ideas:

1. Add primary role dropdown to book info page (users can choose author or editor). Alternatively, we can implement rule: if editor(s), they are primary role; if no editor(s), authors are primary; if no editor(s) or author(s), contributor(s) are primary?
2. display primary role info in place of pride on book homepage
3. display other contributor info in secondary role on book homepage (needs spec/wireframe) -- for example if book has translator(s) or illustrator(s), why not display less prominently below author/editor statement?
4. If editor(s) exist and editor is set to primary role, allow author(s) field to be empty
5. Look for places the PB_author value appears and figure out what to do with them
6. EPUBs must have a creator (to validate). Make sure that editor-only books receive appropriate values.
7. Figure out plan for running head in PDF exports + chapter title pages

[hughmcguire]

see also: #326

[alexdryden]

@SteelWagstaff I have begun working on this issue for the needs that @dgtracy mentioned above, but I'd like to address as many of the other needs listed/linked here as possible. With regards to

3. display other contributor info in secondary role on book homepage (needs spec/wireframe) -- for example if book has translator(s) or illustrator(s), why not display less prominently below author/editor statement?

are you able to take a look at some wireframes I mocked up and give me feedback?

[SteelWagstaff]

@alexdryden Would be delighted to. This has been on our roadmap for too long now, and it would be great to get some positive movement on this issue.

[alexdryden]

@SteelWagstaff sounds great, thanks! I've got the wire framing started with commenting turned on, but you may rather keep all discussion under this issue: wire frame.

I've started by just addressing "how should a secondary contributor appear on the cover page." Our needs would require any arbitrary combination of contributors (translator, editor, etc.) to be included, but the wire frame just displays static content. So I've added a control to the to the wire frame that will display a few different contributor combinations as examples.

[SteelWagstaff]

@alexdryden Love the wire frame concept and display. Are you working on this as a potential fork or pull request, or was the wire frame primarily meant to give us design inspiration for something we'd develop?

[alexdryden]

@SteelWagstaff Great! I had in mind a pull request, but wanted to make sure it was along the same lines as what you all were thinking before committing too much development time to it. I can go ahead mock up the back end interface I had in mind as well, and, if all looks good, start working on a prototype toward the end of June.

[SteelWagstaff]

@alexdryden Sounds terrific!

[SteelWagstaff]

Proposed changes:

1. require book info to have either an editor OR author upon save. Allow books to have editor(s) but no author(s), and author(s) but no editor(s), but not no author(s) and no editor(s)
2. If authors & editors are both present for a book (as with a selected letters or selected poems), display author in current place and 'edited by NAMES of editors' just below
3. If book has editor(s) but no author(s) display 'edited by NAMES of editors' in place of current author and use editor names in running heads of PDF exports (and other places that currently default to PB_authors)
4. If translators and illustrators are present display 'Translated by NAMES of Translators' and/or 'Illustrated by NAMES of Illustrators'
5. If contributor(s) are present continue to display names as now with screenreader text. Consider adding 'Contributions from' or 'Contributors: ' before the list of names. Perhaps replace with Display new 'contributors' block on book home page pressbooks-book#831

[alexdryden]

@SteelWagstaff what do you think about adding a checkbox in the Book Information page that allows admins to toggle whether or not a particular type of contributor shows up on the cover page? Something like this. I'm just thinking about cases where there may be a translator/reviewer/etc and the book publisher wants that metadata to be accurate, but doesn't necessarily want it to show up on the cover.

Then the check boxes could be checked by default to implement the pattern you outlined, and optionally turned off.

I just tested it out as a solution in our dev environment and can share those commits if you'd like.

[MichSpieler]

This has been again requested in a recent support request. (link to ticket - visible for Support staff only)

[SteelWagstaff]

This is still a major issue and should be addressed in a future release of Pressbooks.