Media page and link to respective item

[giocomai]

I had some feedback about people ending up on the page of a media related to an item; those persons were left puzzled, as in our case the media metadata are mostly very basic, as almost all relvant information is included in the item page.

To mitigate this issue, I tried to reduce the chance that people actually end up on the media page without first passing by the item page by removing direct links to media in the pop-ups of the Mapping module as described here.

Ultimately, however, it would still be possible for users to end up on a media page without passing from the item page, either because someone shares the link with them, or via Google, or some other way.

To deal with this issue, I edited the relevant page of my theme, view/omeka/site/media/show.phtml, and added something along these lines at the end of the file:

<?php $itemTitle = $media->item()->title();?>
<b>For more context and details about this media, see the item it refers to</b>: <?php echo $media->item()->link($itemTitle); ?>

(I am still thinking about the most fitting text to put there)

Now, this all works reasonably well, and as far as mitigation goes, I think it’s not too bad.

However, having accomplished this, I found myself wondering if I’m doing this right, or I’m getting this all somehow wrong.

To clarify: I felt the user feedback I got was meaningful, as particulary through the mapping module it is quite easy to end up on a “media” page. That page is (I thought, by its very nature) lacking in context, as context should be on the item page. So… as far as I understand it, either I’m getting this somehow conceptually wrong, and should use item and media differently, or I’d be concerned that many other people end up stranded on some media page of an Omeka S website, without a direct way of finding out what that media refers to.

If the latter is the case, perhaps it would be nice to add a discrete link to the item page from the media page by default, or at least as an option to do that, or something like that.

If instead I’m getting this somehow wrong, any further explanation (conceptual or technical) is welcome.

I should perhaps add that this seems to be a lesser issue for themes that embed directly the media on the item page (even if the media page still exists even in those cases), and that I do think that there is a scope for a separate media page (as it may include more specific details about copyright, or the date when a scan of a document was made, or who took a picture of a given object that is part of a collection, etc.)

[jflatnes]

I don’t think you’re getting anything conceptually wrong here.

It’s possible to have significant metadata that applies only to a file/media, as well as media that doesn’t really work well embedded, or to have so many items per file that it’s not really workable to have them all on a single page, and enabling those use cases is basically why the media page exists. To be sure, it’s (judging by my experience) far more common to have basically “bare” media and have basically all the metadata on the items.

The media show pages should absolutely be linking back to their containing items so that’s something we should be able to add so it’s there out of the box.

[giocomai]

Thanks for the prompt feedback, good to hear this!

It may not be so common for users to end up on media pages wihtout going through the item page, but it is a distinct possibility, somewhat facilitated by the popup in the Mapping module, but also through a number of other ways (search engines, direct shares, etc.).

Ultimately, given that a media is always related to an item, I struggle to see a use case when one would not want to have a reference to the item from the relevant media, even a basic “Go (back) to item”, or a “Media associated to item: {clickable item title}”, or something like that.

Thanks again!