[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] 2.5.2 Subject Browse Index

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 06:10:11PM +0000, Janet Schrader wrote:
>
>I apologize if I'm misunderstanding this. Will the separators cause the subject in the browse list to behave the same way the headings do in our bib record display? I think subject headings in browse and in the bib record should be treated as a complete entity, not as separate topics. I looked at Bibliomation's index and if I click on "United States History Civil War, 1861-1865 Women" I get the 55 entries which is the number in parentheses after that link.
>
>Currently in our bib record displays the subject headings have separators. So the subject heading looks like this:
>United States>History>Civil War, 1861-1865>Women.
>If I click on 'United States' the search is for just that part of the subject. If I click on 'History' the search is for 'United States>History'. If I want to search women in the Civil War I have to click on 'Women' to search the entire subject phrase.
>
>The unfortunate scenario here is that clicking on the beginning of the subject phrase searches only 'United States' and the search times out so a patron gets "sorry no entries were found for 'United States'". Which separate term clicked on determines what gets searched. It is not very intuitive to know that you have to *start at the end* to make the search more specific.

Hmm. The current behaviour seems intuitive to me, but I think I had a
hand in designing and implementing it, so that's probably not surprising.
For what it's worth, Amazon seems to use exactly this scheme for
enabling users to broaden and narrow their searches in their
best seller ranking system once they've landed on an item (see
http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00JKT6VVY for an example).

Do you have an alternative suggestion for representing subject headings
so that it is both possible and more intuitive to search for just
"United States > History > Civil War, 1861-1865" in your example, if a
user wanted to broaden their search from the initial record on which
they might have landed?

While I agree that it's unfortunate that broad search terms result in
search time outs, that's a different problem and it should not drive how
we represent subject headings.