[Viewing annotations] Search & filter across canvases

[a-nnika]

I just clicked through the new mockup for viewing annotations and really like the design and functionality!

What I am missing is the possibility to search & filter all annotations across all canvases of the manifest.
At the moment I don't see how I could search for anything without already knowing the exact page on which I have to look, while a frequent use-case would be to open a book in the viewer and then look for annotations inside it - not on a specific page.

Apart from the search & filter across canvases option, it would be great to mark annotated pages in the page overview, as well as in the content structure. This would also help to find an annotation in a book without knowing on which page it might be.

Maybe I just didn't click on the right buttons and it's already there?

[ggeisler]

Thanks much for your feedback @a-nnika! I'm sure it is not clear since the mockups are still a work-in-progress and incomplete, but I think we intend to make a clear distinction between searching and filtering, where filtering acts only on information already loaded into the current view (e.g., the Annotations sidebar in view for the selected canvas) and searching does a true search of all content indexed by an associated search service.

So, yes, you're correct that, from the Annotations sidebar as in the current mockups, a user could not search for something within any annotation that wasn't in the active canvas. They could only filter what they see on the active canvas. For example, this might be useful if there was a full page transcription or many annotations on the canvas and the user wanted to quickly find occurrences of a given annotated word or phrase.

If the user wanted to search to find an annotated word or phrase across all canvases, they would use the Search tab within the same object window, which we haven't yet designed (it is among the next couple of features on our design to-do list, though). (I believe this assumes the object annotations have been indexed and a search service has been defined in the manifest.)

Apart from the search & filter across canvases option, it would be great to mark annotated pages in the page overview, as well as in the content structure. This would also help to find an annotation in a book without knowing on which page it might be.

Yes, I agree that providing a way for the user to see at glance which canvases in an object have annotations would be a very useful feature. We'll definitely look for ways to do that as we refine the designs.

[ggeisler]

Followup to my previous comment: @jvine and I were discussing this a bit and there are definitely complications to the theoretical distinction between searching in the Search tab and filtering in the Annotations tab. For example, if a user searches on a term in the Search tab and gets, say, 8 hits across 4 canvases, does the user have to click on one result, which puts them in the Annotations tab for that result item's canvas, and then manually go back to the Search tab to click on the next result item, etc.? The UX (moving between two tabs to investigate multiple hits for a search) for that use case seems less than ideal.

So as we start to design the search tab there are considerations that might make us reevaluate details of the Annotations tab and perhaps the filtering vs. searching distinction won't be as cut and dried as I suggested in my previous comment.