[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Introduction and Question

[Dan Scott]

On 13/09/2007, Jason Etheridge <phasefx at gmail.com> wrote:
> I do think it would be useful to give more information on how matches
> are being made, in some generic manner.  Not as a snippet of the
> record with the terms highlighted without any context, but maybe
> something like "Search terms found in blah and blah", where blah is
> maybe some friendly description of the pertinent field mapped from
> MODS or Dublin Core, and not necessarily MARC.
>
> So you might get something like:
>
> 1) Computers and intractability : a guide to the theory of NP-completeness
> by Michael R Garey; David S Johnson
> Search terms found in title, table of contents, and abstract.
>
> 2) Np Completeness Comprehensive Reference, Guide And Solution Manual for Pnp.
> Search terms found in title, subject, user tags, and reviews.
>
> Would that be too weird?  Another notion is to have a sidebar or
> summary of the actual match points as facets for the whole result set.
>  Maybe something like...
>
> Matched on:
>   Title: 5 hits
>   Subject: 10 hits
>   Table of Contents: 3 hits
>   Reviews: 2 hits
>
> Something like that, and then choosing one of those would further
> constrain your search.  Useful?
>
> -- Jason
>

It could be useful info, I think, for a small population: developers
interested in tweaking search algorithms, librarians doing detective
work who want to peek under the covers, and for the atypical patron.
If you're going that far, you might as well show the query after
processing as well (strikeout text for stopwords, greyed-out text for
stems that were removed, etc).

That being said, I don't think most people are going to care how a
particular item was matched with the search string - not enough to
make it a visible part of every retrieved record. That screen real
estate is precious! If you could make it unobtrusive (hide it by
default, surfacing it only with a deliberately set user preference, or
a tiny little "How did you find me?" link), it could be nice.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University