Multiple manifestations of single edition handled poorly

[tfmorris]

Description

The edition below was scanned twice by the Internet Archive, which is arguably redundant and wasteful of resources, but given that that they do it, we should be able to handle it. ImportBot added a second IA identifier to the edition record, but the edition page only displays the first identifier, making the second scan invisible.

Relevant url?

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24656394M/L'%C3%A9volution_du_dogme
https://openlibrary.org/people/ImportBot

Expectation

We either need to be able to handle multiple IA scans per edition record or create duplicate edition records with one scan per record. The latter is singularly unattractive from a metadata point of view, but handling the former may require adjusting how IA does "loans" for books which are still in copyright since currently availability and loans are tied to edition records.

Proposal & Constraints

It's more work, but I'd lean towards adding the concept of "copies" to our metadata model with multiple copies per edition.

Stakeholders

@mekarpeles @hornc

[tfmorris]

This was discovered while reviewing the duplicates in #1620 (comment)

[cdrini]

I agree; I think the best long-term solution would be to have a new type, maybe Copy (or Scan or Digitization), and then have a one-to-many relationship from Edition to Copy. Then each IA id would be associated with a single Copy.

[LeadSongDog]

So your "copy" would be approximately equivalent to frbr:item where "edition" is approximately frbr:manifestation ? Bringing something of the sort into use would be helpful. It would be useful to determine the referent level for each common identifer type: does it pertain to a single item/copy, or to all similar items/copies (the manifestation).

[hornc]

I'm not sure this is an import issue, and not a bug. It looks like the importer did the correct thing here by associating a newly discovered scan with the correct OL record.

I don't think creating a new edition, or new class of thing, is correct. If anything, there is potentially a UI / UX change required as a new feature, but a supporting use-case would help.

From a metadata POV, this seems like the correct behaviour. Source records is a list, and all sources are listed. We only provide one link out to a scan with the ocaid field, and we've got one. Either should be 'good' copies, and there isn't currently an automated way to chose a 'best' one. This example is a public domain scan, so there isn't a availability problem. There might be for borrowable items, but archive.org already has this problem.

[tfmorris]

The example is a public domain scan, but this applies to copyrighted scans that Internet Archive is going to "lend" as well. If they've scanned multiple editions, users can join the wait list for any of them (actually they have to do it individually), but if the same edition is scanned twice, only one of the copies can be lent out through OpenLibrary.

@hornc Are you proposing that we just refuse to support lending multiple scans of the same edition?

[LeadSongDog]

Multiple scans of a single physical copy also represent a way to reduce OCR errors, but that’s an IA process, not OL.