Arctos: Markdown in Agent Remark?

[AJLinn]

The cultural collections uses the Agent Remarks field as a location to put biographical information about agents who are represented in our collections. This can often be quite extensive. As we continue to improve our ability to document the people who make our collections important, it would be really handy to be able to have paragraphs in the Agent Remark field. For example, see the very long single paragraph in this agent record for John E. Thwaites: http://arctos.database.museum/agents.cfm?agent_id=21313700

If we could have the ability to do some formatting in this field, which I think is implemented via Markdown? (sorry for not knowing the proper terminology) it would be really handy. Being able to have paragraphs, maybe even italics if we want to reference a publication someone is known for, would be very useful. Is that something that is possible?

Thanks for considering this enhancement.

[dustymc]

No objection/sounds useful from my perspective, except...

reference a publication

That's best done via relationships. We can add something more formal, or Media works well as relationship duct tape (stick anything to anything....).

Ditto dates - as remarks, they're just text. As "status" dates, we can do stuff with them (eg, "This agent wasn't born yet, are you SURE about the collecting date?" warnings).

[AJLinn]

Having just entered a long bit of info in a few agent records, hoping to bring this up again. The issue was moved to the Agents Committee back in 2018 but I'm sorry to say I'm not sure who is on the Agents Committee and I see we have no progress in tasks for that committee. What needs to happen to approve and implement this enhancement?

[Jegelewicz]

I'm wondering if remarks is appropriate - maybe we need something more formal for a bio like this? Honestly, it seems that Wikipedia would be a better place for this kind of biographical info with a link to the Wiki page in the url section of the agent page. The only problem there is that apparently url addresses don't show up on the public agent page. You can also add a link back to Arctos from the wiki (I'm gonna do this for Artie tomorrow!) which could drive people to Arctos more often.

Artie Wiki
Artie Arctos

We currently don't have anyone heading up the Agents Committee - interested?

[dustymc]

Wikipedia/wikidata definitely has a much broader impact, if that can be made to work. I could pull content in from there as well.

url addresses don't show up on

Sure they do, but might be cached.