Sorting by Librettist

[NLewis]

I was thinking that it might be a useful idea to sort works by librettist. I think that there are two main ways this can be approached, which is why I've brought it up for discussion. My preference would be to create a template for the librettist. The advantage to that would be that normal people could (easily) implement it. The disadvantage that I see it that it's quite a lot of work and not so efficient (though it's a minor draw-back in my opinion).

I think a more efficient way would be to modify the workpage template so that it automatically reads the librettist and puts it in the appropriate category. It's much faster than the first option (and would require Feldmahler), but it would probably cause a lot of errors.

There's no nice, clean-cut way to approach this. What do you guys think?

[Davydov]

It's unlikely that the information in the librettist field is anywhere near standardized enough to be read automatically (as it can contain several names on multiple lines). The most practical solution would be a "{{LinkLib}}" template, like the ones we're bringing in for editors, arrangers and translators. These would also have to be put in manually, unless Feldmahler can come up with a 'search and replace' method for names that crop up quite frequently.

I agree that it's a logical step to link to librettists in the same way that we do for other roles. Quite often the same person will appear as a composer, arranger, editor, translator, librettist and performer, so in the longer term we could think about adapting the existing composer template to handle all these functions.

[KGill]

This sounds like a great idea. I've gone ahead and created a set of two templates similar to the ones for editors, arrangers, and translators, so it can begin to be implemented immediately if there are no objections.
I just thought of something: should there be some sort of mechanism to input dates to the template so they automatically display on the page (with the advantage that if we need to change them, we can do it in one edit rather than, potentially, hundreds)? (It might have been good to do for LinkEd/Arr/Tr as well, but they're so widely used now that it would be a significant amount of work to remove the redundancy...)