This page is deprecated. For more information about our use of Discogs in our production Blacklight catalog, please see: Production: Discogs.

Background

Catalogers often use Discogs as a source of information for creating MARC descriptions; it is generally considered a rich and trustworthy source of information. In LD4P2, Cornell built a prototype that automatically added Discogs information into our Blacklight item view pages for music recordings by using Questioning Authority to query and match descriptions in the catalog with descriptions in Discogs. In this prototype

User Interface Considerations

• How best to integrate Discogs data along side the information already in the catalog, including accounting for any redundancy in the two descriptions
• How to make clear that there is external data being presented to the user (and credit Discogs)

Data Matching Considerations

• What is the optimal combination of search values to ensure correct matches
• How best to override or correct incorrect matches

To search Discogs for matches we are currently using (title_resp, title, subtitle, pub_date, publisher, publisher_nbr, other_tile, author, single_author)

After consulting the MARC specification and catalogers, the 024 7# $a <discogs identifier> $2discogs will be used to override the dynamic search in the previously described matching. While this is the "textbook" way for capturing this information in MARC, as of 2020.09.28 our SOLR index does not include the $2 value in the other_identifier_display field. After considering whether to change how the 024 is handled in Solr or parse the MARC in the marc_display field, it was decided to add a new discogs_id_display Solr field or similar.

Engineering Considerations

• Whether to use Questioning Authority or the Discogs API directly
• Whether to index Discogs data for search, or simply display data dynamically when the page is rendered