Searching Our Patron Catalog: Fun with Special Characters!

Sometimes our patron catalog makes me question my sanity. Today, I was reading an interview on Public Libraries Online with Joshilyn Jackson about her newest book, Someone Else’s Love Story. It looked interesting so I copied the title, from the website, and then pasted it into our catalog. Our catalog claimed we didn't have it which I thought was odd. I went to Amazon, found the ISBN, came back to our search, and pasted the ISBN into the ISBN index. This time our catalog did find the book. Why?

I examined the title again. It looked the same as what I had typed in. I came up with a hypothesis: perhaps our catalog had trouble searching single quotes. I pasted the title in again and substituted an asterisk instead of a single quote like this: Someone Else*s Love Story . This time it worked! I erased the asterisk and typed a single quote in just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. Wait, it worked with the single quote also. I copied the title again, and once again it didn't work. I stared at the screen in frustration.

Finally, I found the problem. It turns out that our catalog has absolutely no problem searching for titles where you use the single quote that appears on your keyboard ('). What it can't do is use right single quotes (’). Look closely, can you see the difference?

Single Quote	Right Single Quote
'	’

So the moral of the story is, if you copy and paste something into our catalog and retrieve no results, makes sure your copy source didn't use special single/double quotes. If it did, erase that part and retype it using your keyboard.

As an aside, we're hoping to move to a new ILS system next year. I double checked and this particular problem should not be an issue in our new system.

Subject Headings are (Usually) Plural

When you search for subject headings in our catalog, always assume that the subject heading is plural.

I just ran across a case where someone, I have no idea who, did a general keyword search for "bildungsroman." If this was a library borrower rather than a staff person, I'm very impressed. When I first started working at the library, I had to look up the term.

Unfortunately, a general keyword search for bildungsroman only returns 5 results. A subject keyword search is even worse, returning no results. Why? It's because our subject headings use the plural form, bildungsromans. All it would have taken for this searcher to retrieve 1,974 results was to add a little s at the end of the word.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty common problem. I've seen quite a few searches fail, including some of my own, because the search query was in the singular form. At some point, we might get a discovery layer* which hopefully will be smart enough to return results for many of these cases. Until then, if you're not using the Advanced Search page, you can try the Subject Alphabetical index which, depending on the term, may provide a hint on whether you should search for the singular or plural form of a word. If you are still intent on using the keyword searches, please, unless you know otherwise, try the plural form first.

* A discovery layer is an interface that sits on top of our catalog and searches the way our catalog should in the first place. This usually includes things such as spell check, relevancy ranking, basic stemming and more. It also often has the ability to integrate, at least to a limited extent, with our databases and other online resources.

Sorry, could not find anything matching

I was reading posts on my romance listserv this morning and someone mentioned that Carola Dunn wrote a mystery series set in the 1960s. The poster had read the second book in the series, A Colourful Death, and thought it was interesting. I've enjoyed Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple series so thought I'd look this one up and give it a try.

I started with an Author - Alphabetical search but quickly wimped out when I saw there were 43 titles by Dunn. Then, I decided it would be faster to do a title search for "A Colorful Death" and then use the series info on the left side of the page to figure out the first book.

When I did a Title Keyword search for a colorful death, I got no results. At first, I was worried we might not have it. Then, I decided adding the article a to the phrase was a mistake since catalogs often ignore articles if it's the first word of a title. I changed my search to just "colorful death" and was taken to the correct record!

I was excited and decided I needed to write a post warning everyone about including initial articles when doing a phrase search. Except . . . that wasn't the reason my search worked. The real reason my first title keyword search hadn't returned anything was because I had used the US spelling for "colorful" instead of the UK spelling of "colourful." If I had searched for "A Colourful Death", I would have seen that we actually had two editions of that book. The only reason my second title keyword search returned anything was because "colorful death" was listed as an Additional Title in the MARC record for that specific edition.

The moral of the story is to always double check your spelling when the catalog doesn't return the results you want. Even though we now have a Did You Mean feature, it's not going to catch every error that I make.

Several years ago I ran across a fantastic article about The Seven Deadly Nyms. It lists several other ways to accidentally mess up your search results. While search engines and catalogs continue to evolve, they still tend to return the results we asked for, not the results we want.