Monday, August 23, 2010

New Blu-ray Search

I've just added a "New Blu-ray" limit to the Advanced page of our catalog. Among other things, this allows you to retrieve a list of all our new Blu-rays. To try it out:

  1. Go to the Advanced search in our catalog.
  2. Next to Title Keyword enter an *. Using an asterisk wild card for a title search means that it will find all items with a title.
  3. Under the New limit box click New Blu-ray.
  4. If desired, choose a sorting option.
  5. Click the Red Arrow to start your search.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

"Did you mean" in New Catalog

A couple of years back, I collected a list of 814 real search terms. Of those, 13% of the searches had a misspelling or typo in them. Unfortunately, our catalog usually returns no results when a word is misspelled, even if it's an obvious typo.

In order to help our users retrieve better results for their searches, we have been looking at a number of different ways to provide a spell check option. Most of the products I found didn't pass my initial "harry poter" search test. However, a couple of months ago, I found an article talking about a Unicorn ILS library using a service called Lucien from Jaunter. I tried out one of the libraries using it and was very pleased with the results. As a bonus, this service is also significantly cheaper than many of the other options.

For the past several months I have been working with Jaunter to try and incorporate "did you mean" suggestions into our new test catalog. We're the first Horizon ILS library to try using their service. At this point, we have it working for the basic search page. Jaunter is still trying to get it to work for the Advanced Search option but given how our catalog is designed, that may not be possible.

I tested the Lucien suggestions using the misspelled words I had previously compiled. It offered correct suggestions about 83% of the time. Here are some of examples I tried:

  • eclips
  • haibane renmai
  • the wedding planers daughter
  • spiderwick chronicals field guide
  • ennvy
  • rurouni kenshi
  • jujistsu
  • english liturature
  • mistang horse
  • malaryia

At this point, I believe this feature is ready for staff testing. Go to our test catalog and let me know what you think of the spelling suggestions.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Adding Series Info to the Catalog

One of the flaws in our catalog is the lack of series info. Often, our catalog records will include series info for a particular book but it won't list the other books in the series. For example, our entry for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight book does list both the series and the series number for the book. However, it doesn't provide a convenient way to know the order of the other books in the series.

I'm currently exploring catalog enhancements that would allow us to show series info in the actual record. However, some vendors have a better coverage of series than others. I need your help in coming up with a list of popular books in a series that I can use to test and make sure any vendor we consider has enough information to be useful. I'm looking for examples for children, young adult, and adult series. Please post a comment or send me an email if you have suggestions I should add to my test list.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

New Language Limits

I've just made a change to our catalog's advanced search page that allows better limits by language.

Originally, our language limits were based on collection codes. Collection codes are designed to let you know where a particular item is located. For instance, you would expect an item with a "Large Print Fiction" collection code to be shelved in the large print area. However, the only language that has its own collection code is Spanish. While Spanish is currently the dominent non-English language within our district, other languages are also becoming more common. As a result, we decided it was time to look at a better way to search by language.

The new language limits I have just implemented are based on MARC, the underlying data for every bib record. This allows us to limit based on a much wider range of languages. For the sake of simplicity, I have decided to only provide limits for languages where we have at least 20 works in that language. Currently, this list includes:

  • Arabic
  • Chinese
  • Danish
  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Hebrew
  • Hindi
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Latin
  • Persian
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Somali
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
Let me know if you feel any specific language should be added to this list and I'll research it.

An Example:
With the old language limits based on collection codes, you couldn't search for Spanish music. While we have collection codes for many Spanish items, we don't have one specifically for music. However, using the new language limits, this search is now possible.

  1. Go to our catalog, http://catalog.mylibrary.us/
  2. Click on the Advanced search page
  3. Type an * next to Title Keyword
  4. Under Format, choose Music
  5. Under Language choose Spanish
  6. Click the red arrow to start your search
You should now see a list of all music in Spanish within the district.

Quirk Alert:
While limiting by MARC tags instead of collection codes is generally more precise, there is a bug in HIP that does prevent all matching records from being displayed. For those that remember their cataloging lessons, it searches the 008 field but only the first 041 $a subfield. What this means is that the limit should return results for all records in the original language but it may miss some titles that are either multilingual works or the language is available as a subtitle for a movie.

For example, look at the movie Walk on Water. This movie's original language is Hebrew which is reflected by appearing in the 008 tag. However, it is also available to watch in English or German. Because English is listed as the first language in the 041 field, if I limit by English, the movie will appear. However, since German is the third language listed, it will not appear when I limit by German.

Thanks go to Clara M for suggesting the original idea of using MARC language codes instead of collection codes and Eric P for later testing and patiently explaining the intricacies of the MARC codes to me.