internetarchive / internetarchive/openlibrary

Merger Workflow: Merging author records should somehow queue up their work records for merger

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#4,133 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Affects: Librarians Lead: @cdrini Priority: 3 Type: Feature Request
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Python
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Description

Whenever I merge records for an author, there are usually quite a few redundant work records that in turn need to be merged. Whilst some of these are tricky to identify (e.g. translations), the majority are straightforward, with the same author and title.

### Describe the problem that you'd like solved

Facilitate or automate the merger of works by the merged author.

### Proposal & Constraints

Spitballing, something like this, perhaps:
1. After records for an author have been merged, automagically build a list of all that author's works. This might be cued by the "recent author mergers", but delayed a few days (years?) to allow SOLR time to catch up.
2. Alpha sort and group the list by title, also showing work IDs and edition counts for each main title.
3. Create a list of suggested work-merge actions, eg to Merge OL23456 into OL12345W (where the latter is the one with the most editions.)
4. Pass the list somewhere it can be actioned with human oversight, perhaps as a issue for the openlibrary-client, or at least provide hotlinks on the main work record to to other(s) to facilitate manual mergers.

### Additional context

### Stakeholders

@seabelis @tfmorris

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