[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] OPAC searching (using staff client, at least)

[Dan Scott]

Hi Brian, for what's its worth, here's my attempt at answering the
questions I felt I could tackle, or comments on your questions.

On 03/04/2008, Bryan Baldus <bryan.baldus at quality-books.com> wrote:
>  2. Does Keyword search not include the publisher? Is there a way to search by publisher aside from using the MARC Expert Search?

Nope. I suppose one could create an index specifically for publisher,
though. The process of defining your own index would make for a great
"how-to" document.

>  3. Would it be possible to have a limit for Bibliographic Level (MARC Leader/07)?

We would be interested in a similar feature. One of our collections is
essentially a catalogue of individual articles (07 = 'b'), and it
confuses our users to get article-level results mixed with books and
journal titles.

>  4. Is there a known problem with the MARC Expert Search? It seems like it would be a very useful feature, but most of the times I've tried using it, I've received no hits, even when I know there are records that should match.

I had the same experience as you on http://demo.gapines.org (which is
running the 1.2.1.x branch of Evergreen, I believe), but have had no
problems running expert searches on our 800K record test instance at
http://biblio-dev.laurentian.ca/ (running Evergreen trunk) with either
relatively obscure field/subfield combos or very common ones (e.g.
349a "Social work" w/250 hits vs.  245a "canada" w/13000 hits) - I
think it's a result of the Evergreen version, where Mike and Bill have
been busy improving the search performance.

>  5. Is there a way to sort search results for secondary searches (those done using the box at the top of the results), without having to go back to the main search page?

If I understand what you're asking, this is addressed in the trunk
version of Evergreen, and will be part of the 1.2.2.x release. There
will be a little "Sort by" drop-down box at the top of the results
that will enable you to sort by relevance, author, title, or
publication date.

>  6. When viewing the full MARC View for a record, it might be nice to be able to go back to the listing of results without having to choose OPAC view and then clicking the Go Back button (so, if there were a Go Back button on the MARC View display).

Hmm. In trunk I typically just hit the "View MARC" link at the top
right, and that displays the MARC record in a pop-up window. But I
could see something more explicit than "Go Back" as an option (I would
expect "Go Back" from "MARC View" to go back to the regular record
display, and then the next "Go Back" to go back to the results).

>  7. Is it possible (a setting somewhere, perhaps) to have more than 10 results display at once?

I took a brief look through the code but didn't find where this limit
was set. It must be possible, of course - perhaps we could expose it
as a staff client preference.

-- 
Dan Scott
Laurentian University