[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Proposal to remove some advanced search options from the catalog

[Rogan Hamby]

+1

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 1:13 PM, Kathy Lussier <klussier at masslnc.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I wanted to float an idea to the community. I spent a little time this
> morning looking at a bug submitted earlier this year regarding the Matches
> Exactly search option in the advanced search screen -
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1267129. After thinking about
> the problem, I came to a conclusion that I've drawn on similar occasions
> when looking at previous problems with exact match searching that has since
> been fixed. Overall, I think this search option along with, to a lesser
> extent, the Starts With search option, is more likely to cause frustration
> for users than to solve any search problems.
>
> I'm curious to know if others have found the same problems in their
> libraries and, if so, if there is any willingness in the community to
> remove those options in the advanced search screen to save frustration on
> the part of users.
>
> My reasons for removing them are below:
>
> 1. The intent of this search option is to perform a left- and
> right-anchored search on the search terms. The entered search terms need to
> exactly match the index as it appears in the relevant metabib table. If
> doing a title search, you need to enter the entire title including 245a and
> 245b. I believe most users are unlikely to know what the subtitle is for a
> book and a. The re more likely to enter just the words that are in 245a.
>
> 2. Right now, there is a bug with Matches Exactly. As of now, if you enter
> the following terms in the search box:
>
> the joy of cooking
>
> the system will retrieve anything that begins with "the", ends with
> "cooking" and also contains the words "joy of" in no particular order. I
> just conducted a matches exactly search for the help today and, in addition
> to retrieving "The Help" it also retrieved a record for "The Berenstain
> Bears hurry to help." The fix for this particular issue is fairly easy, but
> the fix also means that the Matches Exactly will become even more
> unforgiving than what I outlined in #1 above. Punctuation will matter more.
> In addition to entering all of the words in the 245a and 245b, the user
> will also need to know where to add punctuation. From what I can tell, this
> isn't consistent for all punctuation. In looking for the title "The assist
> : hoops, hope, and the game of their lives" the following search works:
>
> "^The assist hoops, hope, and the game of their lives$"
>
> but these searches do not work:
>
> "^The assist : hoops, hope, and the game of their lives$"
>
> "^The assist hoops hope and the game of their lives$"
>
> It looks like the user needs to know that the colon should be removed, but
> the commas should remain.
>
> 3. The "Starts With" search is a little more forgiving since a user is
> more likely to know the start of a title rather than the entire string, but
> it still suffers from the problems of a user needing to know what
> punctuation should be entered (or not entered) for the string that they
> type. Since it is a search that uses left-anchoring, it also does not
> ignore non-filing indicators, which is something that users sometimes
> expect it to do. Note: I was the person who added the "Starts With" search
> to Evergreen, mainly as a way to ameliorate the issues we saw with the
> "Matches Exactly" search. Now that Browse search is available in the
> catalog, I don't think this particular search is necessary on the advanced
> search screen anymore.
>
> 4. In a standard Evergreen installation where no custom indexes have been
> added, both of these search options will probably fail for a keyword
> search. This happens because, by default, there is one keyword index (the
> blob) where all of the indexed terms for the record are stored, and there
> is no way any user could know all of the terms that are stored there and
> their proper order. If they are entering a title, they are more likely to
> have successful Starts With keyword searches because the title seems to be
> the first thing that starts off the blob, but if the user were entering any
> other terms (author's last name?) for a Starts With keywords search, the
> search will fail.
>
> Rather than present a search option to our users that has a higher
> likelihood of leading to unsuccessful search results than our other search
> options, I would like to see if there is willingness in the community to
> remove these options in the next (March/April) release of Evergreen.
>
> Please feel free to share any feedback you have to this idea.
>
> Thank you!
> Kathy
>
> --
> Kathy Lussier
> Project Coordinator
> Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative
> (508) 343-0128
> klussier at masslnc.org
> Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier
> #evergreen IRC: kmlussier
>
>


-- 

Rogan Hamby, MLS, CCNP, MIA
Managers Headquarters Library and Reference Services,
York County Library System

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit
me.”
― C.S. Lewis <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1069006.C_S_Lewis>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-general/attachments/20140929/0bfccf72/attachment.htm>