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

[alphapetjg]

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: Browse of type date can't reach all years DSpace#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: DSpace/DSpace#10055

[tdonohue]

I think this ticket will require more discussion because it's implying we may wish to undo the changes in DSpace/DSpace#10055.

Overall, it seems like there's some disagreement around whether this Browse by Issue Date should act more like a "skip to bookmark" (where it returns everything in the given year or after) or if it should filter exactly by year (where it only returns items from the selected year).

As noted in DSpace/DSpace#10055, users also found the filter by year behavior confusing because you'd often see no results if a given year had no matches. This also meant that it was impossible to find some items in the Browse by Issue Date because the dropdown cannot list every valid year (as the first year range and last year range are often very far apart). That's why the behavior was changes to act more like a "bookmark".

So, I think we'd need discussion about what a better design may look like so that we don't continue changing the behavior back and forth. Therefore, this ticket might be good to consider bringing to DCAT for discussion & feedback.

Flagging as "needs discussion"

[alphapetjg]

@tdonohue Hi Tim, thank you for your comments. I think either way, more explicit communication about how the browse behaviour works would be helpful :)

[tinsch]

A third option would be to provide a date range picker like so:

This would not be part of the "browse by" dropdown but we could easily add it to the search-filter sidebar.