[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Children's search scope

[Kathy Lussier]

Hi all,

We were talking this morning about the possibility of creating a children's
search scope in the catalog and were wondering if anyone has ever built a
search scope like this or might have ideas on how we could do so. I know
there is a current development project for a kids catalog that might
incorporate scoping for children's materials, but we were wondering if there
were ways to incorporate this scope into the existing catalog.

Some ideas we considered include:

Creating an org unit type called collections that would be a child of the
branch where we could add a children's collection. Items would be added at
the collections level and users would be added at the branch level. However,
the big drawback to this method is when capturing holds, you would need to
put items into transit when you are essentially filling a hold that will be
picked up in the same building. Is there any way stop an item from going
into transit if we were using this kind of setup?

Another idea was to group shelving locations together into a search scope.
However, you cannot incorporate shelving locations into a URL to create a
search scope the way you can with an org unit. If we could, this approach
might be workable

Are there other ways we might be able to do this? I know there are limiters
for audience and shelving location on the advanced search page, but the
audience limiters are looking at MARC codes, which don't necessarily reflect
where the item is shelved. Selecting multiple shelving locations to cover
the entire children's collection is probably not ideal from a user
standpoint, which is why we were exploring the idea of incorporating those
parameters into a URL to create the search scope. 

Thanks in advance for your ideas!

Kathy Lussier

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Kathy Lussier
Project Coordinator
Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
(508) 756-0172
(508) 755-3721 (fax)
klussier at masslnc.org
IM: kmlussier (AOL & Yahoo)
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier