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.

Searching for a CD

A while back, I checked out a CD from Carbon Valley that I really enjoyed. In fact, I decided to return the CD and buy a copy for myself. However, I returned the CD before writing down the title of the artist. Over the weekend, I visited Carbon Valley with Calvin, my son, and decided I should try to hunt down the CD. I remembered that it was in the classical section so I started flipping through CDs. However, Calvin was getting impatient and I didn't feel like flipping through all of the CDs. Plus, I'd never find it if someone else had it checked out. I decided to try searching for it via our catalog.

Being the catalog sys admin, you'd think I would immediately have the perfect search strategy to find what I'm looking for. I remembered that one of the songs on the CD was "My Funny Valentine" which I'd also heard on Lullaby for my favorite insomniac by Ahn Trio. I knew that our catalogers usually include the individual songs on a CD in the "contents note" of the catalog record. So, I decided to try a Title Keyword search for "My Funny Valentine." I retrieved no relevant results, not even the CD by Ahn Trio. I decided that I must have remember the name of the song wrong so I went and looked up the Ahn Trio record. I had remembered the name of the song correctly. Suddenly, I realized that I had used the wrong search index. I felt kind of sheepish.

Originally, the Title Keyword for our public catalog would search the content notes of a record. However, searching this field can more than double the results for a simple keyword search. We decided that since most people are looking for the main title of a resource, it made sense to seperate out the content note from the main Title Keyword search index. We made this change several years ago. Now if people want to search the content note of a record, they need to use the Title and Content Keyword search. This search index will retrieve both title and content keyword matches. As a result, this is the index that I should have used.

Once I realized my mistake, I redid my search using the correct index. Even though I enclosed my search query in quotation marks, which forces it to search for the entire phrase, I still retrieved 36 results. I realized that if I used our adavanced search, I could narrow down this number significantly. Here's the steps I took:

• On the advanced search page, I clicked the drop down box and chose Title and Content Keyword.
• In the text box next to that index, I entered "My funny valentine", including the quotes.
• Under Location, I chose Carbon Valley Regional Library.
• Under Format, I selected "Music."
• I clicked the red arrow to start my search.

My search returned 9 results which was a much smaller number to scan. I scrolled down until I saw a title that sounded familar, Music from a farther room by Lucia Micarelli. Luckily, it was checked in so I quickly flipped through the "m" CDs in the classical music section and happily confirmed that this was the CD I had been searching for.