Hi, I’m new to Omeka S, and wanted to clarify the expected behavior of the Metadata Browse module’s “Direct Links” option on URI fields. I expected that enabling “Direct Links” would enable the direct linking behavior on all selected fields regardless of data type. What I’m seeing is that there is no change to the display of URI fields when “Direct Links” is enabled. I am still seeing the label link out to the URI with a separate “View all items with this value” link below.
Based on this reply, it looks like this is the expected behavior. Is that correct?
What I would like to achieve is storing a value as a URI internally (such as a Library of Congress authority URI for a subject heading), but providing a Metadata Browse direct link to the end user. Is this currently possible or being considered?
When testing the public site view, I expected that clickable values to take me to other items that share that value, not to an external linked data vocabulary. If I weren’t a metadata librarian, I would probably be pretty confused about what I was looking at on the LC linked data site and how I got there.
Thank you, and please let me know if I’m missing something! As I said, I’m new to this so might be misunderstanding.
You’re correct about the behavior: Metadata Browse only applies that “Direct Links” option to values that are plain text. The concern with URI or Resource values is that applying the Metadata Browse link to show the other items with the same value eliminates the ability to use the “real” link that the value normally represents.
This concern is why the module initially didn’t even have the “direct” option and just added an additional “all items with this value” link, since that can preserve the normal link from the value and provide the metadata-based browsing functionality at the same time.
So as things stand currently, to have Metadata Browse do its job for URI values, the “direct” option must be off. There’s a couple ways we can try to deal with this: one is just to treat URIs as if the direct option is off even when it’s on, in other words to always show the “extra” link in that case. The other would be allowing overriding of the links, but we’d definitely have to make that another setting users would need to opt into, because there’s definitely lots of use cases for URI values where presenting that normal link to users is the whole purpose of the value.
Okay, thanks so much for clarifying! I’d love to see the option to override the links in the future, but for now, clarifying the current behavior in the docs would be really helpful – after enabling Direct Links on a bunch of URI fields, I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why it “wasn’t working.”
If it would be helpful, I can take a pass at adding this info in the module documentation and send a pull request. Thank you!