The "view image" not highlighting bounding box

Randy Wilson

When dealing with an obituary in the new Source Linker, you can click "View Image" to bring up the newspaper image in a separate tab. That works great.

However, some records have a bounding box associated with each record or person, including obituaries that were processed by Computer-Aided Indexing (CAI). To get that to work right, the URL needs to include "?personaUrl=/ark:/61903/1:1:<personaId>" at the end.

For example, if you go to FT person GRH4-MNB, and click "Review attachments" on the obituary, you go to the Source Linker here:

https://www.familysearch.org/search/linker?pal=/ark:/61903/1:1:Q59P-PRQH&id=GRH4-MNB

If you then click "View Image", you are taken to the image via this URL:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS21-L7ZG

Since no persona was specified, this results in all of the 20 or so obituary articles being highlighted on the image. The list of personas at the bottom includes over 100 names, and it took me a couple minutes to find the one I was looking for. Once I clicked on it, the URL in the browser bar turned to this:

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CS21-L7ZG?personaUrl=/ark:/61903/1:1:Q59P-PRQH

That is, it included "?personaUrl=/ark:/61903/1:1:Q59P-PRQH" at the end. This causes the correct record's bounding box to be highlighted (and no others), which makes it so much faster for the user to find what they're looking for.

Bounding boxes weren't really a thing back when the original source linker was built, so this is likely new functionality, but it would be helpful to users.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Just as long as the image link from Source Linker sticks with the old viewer!

(The fact that SL, both old and new, invokes the vastly more capable old viewer is one of those weird quirks that I find myself making frequent use of. In fact, I'd rather go through the extra steps and superfluous tabs of using "review attachments" or the "unfinished" notice if there is one than click an image link that I know will bring up the new viewer. Yes, I can go from new to old by editing the URL, but that means selecting tiny text in the browser bar, and heaven help me if I'm off by one character. Staying on the new viewer is not an option; it hides the information I need about film and image numbers, lies through its teeth about cataloging information, and makes me seasick with the way it bounces around during my attempts at pan and zoom.)