web client serials: discussion of multiple pattern handling

[Andrea Neiman]

Currently, the web client serials module allows for multiple active prediction patterns to be associated with a single subscription.

Opening this ticket for a community discussion of options for active pattern handling.

Possible options include:
-only allow one active prediction pattern at a time per subscription
-if issues are predicted from "Manage Issues" and more than one pattern is active, ask the user to select the correct pattern before creating issues
-other?

[Irene Patrick (iepatrick)]

I'm not sure why this is a bug. Serials can have multiple active patterns attached. We have some serials that have a basic pattern, and a separate pattern for either a supplement or an index (or both). We need the ability to create separate patterns for each type of item being published.

If the problem is that you can have more than one active basic pattern attached to a subscription, then I would agree that should be changed. But don't eliminate the ability to create separate active patterns for supplements and indexes.

[Andrea Neiman (aneiman)]

Hi Irene -- this isn't a bug, per se, but rather I opened it to solicit opinions of the community about how to best handle multiple active patterns of one single type (and I'm sorry for not making that more clear in the initial report). Evergreen does currently support different patterns for basic, supplement, and index types and there are not plans to change this, since it's a critical part of Serials prediction as you noted.

I was interested in how best to handle workflow issues where there might be, say, two active supplement patterns on one subscription (or two active basic patterns, or two active index patterns) -- how would the user expect the system to handle this? Would you expect that only one be allowed to be active? Would you want to choose one at the time of prediction? Would you want to set one as primary/default? Etc. So if you have thoughts on that, please share! :)

[Beth Willis (willis-a)]

For the most part, our libraries have only one subscription of any given serial title. So, there typically is just one basic caption and pattern. If the title's publication schedule changes, a new caption and pattern is created. In this case, I think the original caption and pattern should be deleted, though this does not always happen. Do other consortia or library systems use multiple basic captions and patterns? Is this because serials management is centralized?

In our situation, if there is more than one basic caption and pattern for a subscription, it would likely be inadvertent. Therefore, I would prefer to select a default caption and pattern as active and to have that selection remain until I manually changed it. I would not want to have to choose a caption and pattern each time I generated predictions, especially if we have only one.

Since workflows vary, would it be possible to make this a user or library setting?