Make Browse by Issue Date functionality more transparent/intuitive to users

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
angular, typescript
Domain
frontend

Research direction

The issue points to the Browse by Issue Date filter and its startswith behavior, but does not name the Angular files or tests involved. First review the browse UI and related issue #10055, then determine whether the proposed scope is a UI explanation or a change to date filtering. Done means the selected approach clearly communicates or implements the intended date range without losing the current behavior unexpectedly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

needs discussion needs triage new feature

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We've noticed that the Browse by Issue Date option returns all results from the selected date forward. For example, selecting '1992' returns all results with an issue date of 1992-present, not just the records issued in 1992.

We can see from the URL and in the Browse java file there is a startswith condition applied to this Browse filter:
https://demo.dspace.org/browse/dateissued?bbm.page=1&startsWith=2023

We have found that this configuration can often be confusing to end users, who expect to only see the records of the year they select. We would like to suggest either changing how this filter is set up, or at the very least, adding some text in the UI to communicate how the Browse by Issue Date filter works and help users to interpret the results. Understanding that the first option is a more significant change, we would be curious to hear how others in the DSpace community feel about these avenues, and whether a label change or info tip would improve the experience without requiring a change to the browse logic.

Describe the solution you'd like

One of two options:

  • Change the Browse by Issue Date functionality to only return results from the selected year. We recognize this would be a more extensive/significant change resulting in a longer dropdown menu of browse dates for repositories with many older records and changing the current behaviour where pre-2010 items are collapsed into either 5 or 10 year increments. See: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/10055

OR

  • Add guidance (e.g., info tip) or update label to make it more clear to end users that Browse by Issue Date will return all results from the selected date forward and that an individual year can be selected from the Advanced Search page using the date facet.

Additional information

Related ticket: https://github.com/DSpace/DSpace/issues/10055

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
180
Forks
577
Avg merge
2d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
100

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