okfn/bibserver — Issue #181: View record failing for duplicate cids
Author: pitman
Created: 2012-02-04 20:53:23+00:00
State: open

In the collection
http://bibsoup.net/pitman/jordan_michael_i
which I just refreshed, it appears that all the view record links fail, apparently due to duplication of cids in records.
It looks like this dataset has each cid appearing twice. This was a mistake on my side, but it should be handled better
by BibSoup. This may be a good test dataset to test handling of repeated cids.
A typical view record link is

http://bibsoup.net/pitman/jordan_michael_i/yxUduqMAAAAJ:UeHWp8X0CEIC

This gives a nice error message "Unfortunately, there are multiple records in the collection with the same identifier ... "
and indicates there are tow records assoc with this cid, namely

http://bibsoup.net/record/5e4b830982fc4af5899a6c1db8a9a4f4

http://bibsoup.net/record/fc89f7de6b0b4b918c449e74f7e6e397

but each of these returns "No results".
Good handling of duplicate cids should allow BibServer to be used as part of a UI to assist users in deduping their
datasets. I dont think it should necessarily be regarded as an error to have duplicate cids. It may rather be a feature, if
such duplication is used as a method of flagging records for the same "thing" in the biblio sphere. Exactly what is meant by "same" is at present up to the user to decide. But we could provide some usage guidelines. Compare recent discussion on the list of issues of clustering and deduping of records.