Staff Catalog - Number of Shelving Locations is Confusing

[Terran McCanna]

3.12 Angular Staff Catalog

In the search results, clicking on Show More Details indicates the number of shelving locations that copies can be found under, but this seems more confusing than helpful.

In the example shown in the attached screenshot, there are indeed 11 unique shelving location names used, BUT:

- The same shelving location names can be used at different branch locations, so in essence they are actually different physical locations (in this example there are 72 different physical locations for those 94 copies)
- The number of items retrieved in the list (11) matches the number of shelving locations (11) but the relationship between them doesn't make any sense - there are only 4 different unique shelving locations and 5 unique physical locations on the retrieved list.

What is the reason for showing the number of shelving locations in the first place? It's not useful for us (PINES), but is it useful for other library systems?

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

Noting that the wording in question was originally added in the patch for bug 2016742. Upon looking at the code, the count it reports is clearly the number of items, not the number of shelving locations.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

Hmm. It says it's using summary.copies.length, but that number (11) doesn't match the number of actual copies (94).

I guess it's making a subset of copies to display in the summary on that page and then just counting that number in the subset?

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

Upon doing some more digging, the item information that displays here is coming from open-ils.search.biblio.record.catalog_summary.staff. When Show More Details is in effect, the options hash for that method has copy_limit set to 5... which means show me up to five items each for up to five volumes.

Comments in code suggest that it's aiming for showing a "representative" set of copies. I think there is a discussion to be had about the usefulness of that, but that discussion is for another bug.

For _this_ bug report, I think the key point for the wording that caption is that table is not of shelving locations, but of items... but not necessarily _all_ items that fit the search parameters.

[Benjamin Kalish (bkalish)]

I wouldn't care about the number of shelving locations, even if it were accurate. Number of items and number of libraries are both actually useful, but number of shelving locations really isn't.

[Stephanie Leary (stephanieleary)]

I looked back over the revised shelving locations table, and what I added to the caption is just a visible copy of what gets announced to screen reader users: the number of table rows. I'm perfectly happy to remove this if it's an inaccurate reflection of the actual shelving locations. I do think we should retain the visible caption on the table, but it would be fine to remove the count.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

I think removing the count is the best thing to do since it is not counting what it says it is counting.

[Stephanie Leary (stephanieleary)]

Here's a branch that removes the count, leaving the rest of the caption as-is.
https://git.evergreen-ils.org/?p=working/Evergreen.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/user/sleary/LP2048798-shelving-locations-count

[Susan Morrison (smorrison425)]

I have tested this code and consent to signing off on it with my name, Susan Morrison, and my email address, <email address hidden>.

[Gina Monti (gmonti90)]

I also looked at this but wanted to add: is having a limit of what displays of the shelving location like a max of 10 a decent proposal? I just think for some consortia like us which has a lot, it's going to be an insanely long list when searching via CONS in the Angular catalog.

[Stephanie Leary (stephanieleary)]

Gina, I could have sworn there was a different bug about adding pagination to this table, but I can't find it now.

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

It should definitely be a separate bug from this one.

[Galen Charlton (gmc)]

More context on the origin of this can be found in bug 1908722, including a discussion -- and rejection, on grounds that I question -- of making the items table under more details page-able.

The limit is hardcoded - up to five items each of up to five call numbers.

In any event, as far as I can tell, the "Shelving location" language first appeared in the patches for bug 2016742. Prior to that, the more details div had no caption at all.

Removing the count is better than nothing, but whatever that table is, it is not at its core a list of shelving locations, but of up to 25 items. Would "Representative items for" be too pedantic a caption?

[Terran McCanna (tmccanna)]

Fix committed for 3.12 and up so that it can solve the immediate problem.

If further changes are desired to limits or wording, please create a new launchpad bug. Thanks!