[Dspace-general] browsing by author

[Ann Lally]

Thanks for your reply MacKenzie; you described precisely what we are trying
to do and confirmed all the problems we suspected we would have trying to
implement it!

Ann

-----Original Message-----
From: MacKenzie Smith [mailto:kenzie at MIT.EDU] 
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 3:38 PM
To: alally at u.washington.edu; dspace-general at MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: [Dspace-general] browsing by author

Hi Ann,

I don't think this has come up before, so I'd like to just be sure I 
understand what you're asking:

When doing an author browse, you would like to change the sort order from 
the default
(straight alphabetic) to also be weighted by institutional affiliation in 
some arbitrary manner.

In which case, this first requires that the author affiliation be present 
in the item metadata,
along with the author name. Assuming for a moment that there's a DC field 
that can hold that
type of information, the normal way to do this would be to:
-- customize the first submission screen where it asks for the authors to 
also prompt for affiliations
-- change the DSpace browse code to check for author affiliation in 
determining the sort order for
(which will be tricky since it would then need to check *two* values to 
determine the sort order
instead of the current *one* value -- a harder programming problem).

So this wouldn't be possible today without some programming, but it's 
probably possible.

MacKenzie

At 02:54 PM 10/20/2004 -0700, Ann Lally wrote:
>Has anyone addressed the issue of sorting the browse function by author?
>Some clarification: all authors are considered equal in DSpace, so if you
>have multiple authors from different institutions there is no distinction
>between those of the community and "others", in the browse list.  We have a
>community that would very much like to see UW authors listed first or
>highlighted or somehow distinguished.  I'm curious to know if this issue
has
>come up other places and how it was addressed.
>
>Ann Lally
>Head, Digital Initiatives
>University of Washington Libraries
>Box 352900
>Seattle, WA 98195-2900
>206.685.1473

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building 14S-308
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu