EIDR Upgrades Records Ancestry Interface

Constantly on the hunt for ways to upgrade how users interact with its records, the Entertainment ID Registry (EIDR) has updated the look and interactivity of its record ancestry view, or the ability to see how one record is related to other records in the registration tree, such as episodes of a series.

“When we migrated from our legacy Web UI to the new platform, users were not happy with the record ancestry view,” said Richard Kroon, EIDR’s technical director. “We’ve spent some time implementing a new approach that addresses the issues in the new Web UI but also adds the features and functions that users requested in the legacy UI.

The result: an interactive record relationships view that shows the current record in context of its ancestors, siblings, and descendants, and allows the user to quickly navigate to any other record in the tree using summary metadata records in the ancestry tree. This fills a critical gap in the Web UI's feature set and advances it well beyond EIDR’s legacy UI.

“Matthew Li, our JavaScript/React developer, has completed several projects for us, including the new podcast registration tool, but I think his work on the ancestry view will have with widest and most lasting impact on our users,” Kroon said. “This makes the Web UI significantly easier to use, enabling quick and accurate record research and discovery without forcing users to perform multiple queries.”

Whenever users are on the “View Record” screen with EIDR, a “View Ancestry” option appears. Clicking on that shows users the current record in the context of its siblings and ancestors in a column to the left of the “Record View.”

If the record is part of a registration tree (a movie with edits, a series with episodes, etc.), arrows appear that expand/collapse the ancestry view at that level. Each summary record in the ancestry contains the key differentiating metadata elements for a record of that type.

The record type is a combination of “Creation Type” and “Referent Type,” so "TV Episode" and "Movie Edit" are identified directly.

In the legacy UI, users would have to look at the record’s metadata to determine if it was a Title record, Episode, Edit, Clip, or Manifestation — now that's displayed directly in the ancestry tree.

The goal is to give the user what they need to differentiate very similar records so they can find what they’re after quicker and easier. Clicking on an EIDR ID in the ancestry tree refreshes the “Record View” with that EIDR record’s metadata. In the legacy UI, selecting a record in the relationships tree would take you back to the “Record View” screen and one would have to manually switch back to “Relationships.” Now both are displayed side-by-side.

“We've also added the convenience of presenting ‘Seasons’ and ‘Episodes’ sorted by their number instead of just displaying them in registry order, which was both unpredictable and un-helpful,” Kroon said.