internetarchive / internetarchive/openlibrary

Replace all date entry fields with a searchable date picker

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#7,325 4 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
Affects: Librarians Lead: @jimchamp Needs: Breakdown Needs: Community Discussion Priority: 4 State: Blocked Theme: Editing Type: Feature Request
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Python
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Description

At the moment, all dates have to be entered manually. That results in a wide range of spreads and potential chaos when librarians use different calendars. It also means that certain standards of OpenLibrary (like using XX for an unknown part of a date) are not widely used.

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

I want a searchable data picker for any date entry field.

At the moment, I know of the following date entry fields:

My Books:
- already read list

Editions
- The "Want to read" / "Have read" form under the books cover

Edit Editions
- Date of Publication

Author
- Birth
- Death

### Proposal & Constraints

Data Pickers are an extremely common tool on many web sites. [Wikidata](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Dates) also offers some expanded date sanitization techniques for dates.

With "searchable" I mean that it should still be possible to enter the date by hand, like in this example for a [React datepicker](https://codesandbox.io/s/react-datepicker-custominput-sample-forked-fizf4j?file=/src/App.tsx). Without this manual input, it would be inconvenient to enter dates that happened long ago.

### Additional context

#7261 (This is a part of _Improve OpenLibrary's User Interface to make librarians work easier_)

### Stakeholders

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

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