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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
For the past several weeks our ILS Upgrade team has been working furiously to identify the essential features in our catalog and assign people to test them in the upgraded version of our software. You can see our project site here as well as the list of features we plan to test. We hope to have the initial round of testing completed by the end of July.
Here are the essential features we have identified for the patron catalog:
In addition to core features, we are also exploring adding some additional enhancements. They include:
I think it's time to take a break from talking about the new patron catalog. Instead, let's talk about the Author Alphabetical search index results.
One of the many confusing aspects of our catalog is how it displays author results when using an Author Alphabetical search index. For example, take a look at the author results for Janet Evanovich. We see something like this:
| 1. | Evanovich, Janet | 230 |
| 2. | Evanovich, Janet. High five. Spanish | 1 |
| 3. | Evanovich, Janet. Ivan takes a wife | 5 |
| 4. | Evanovich, Janet. One for the money. | 2 |
| 5. | Evanovich, Janet. Plum lovin'. | 1 |
| 6. | Evanovich, Janet. Plum lucky. | 1 |
| 7. | Evanovich, Janet. Three to get deadly. | 2 |
| 8. | Evanovich, Janet. Two for the dough. | 2 |
| 9. | Evanovich, Janet. Visions of sugar plums. | 1 |
Author/title’s in the “author” indexes are generally of these purposes:
- The author/title heading represents an instance of that work in a collection. For example, in a collection of short stories. “One for the money” is part of the collection Three plums in one.
- To indicate what the original title of a work was. For example, ”Ivan takes a wife” is the original title of Love overboard. This can also be seen on items that are translations. “High five. Spanish” means that this item, High five, is in Spanish.
- The author/title is related to the item cataloged. This is seen most in our catalog for movie adaptions of books. For example: Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the goblet of fire. lists the movies, not the books.
However, if you've used a lot of other library systems, you'll have seen that many of their author results are not as confusing. Basically, this is because our particular ILS processes author entries a little differently than other systems. It does not have the ability to just show the author's name. Instead, it shows the entire entry for the author/work combination. Theoretically, we could kludge something together that would fix the display problem. However, this would likely result in our catalog records no longer meeting common cataloging standards. This, in turn, would complicate any ILS changes we made in the future.
So, which author entry should I pick when faced with multiple authors that look the similar? I usually click whichever entry has the most titles attached to it. In the case of Janet Evanovich, it would be the first entry.
The last couple of weeks have been a blur. We've had our kickoff ILS testing meeting and now I'm immersed in the details. We've picked leaders to head testing for the various areas of the new library system. While my main responsibility will be organizing the project, I also chose to be the leader for the new patron catalog because it's my favorite ILS module (is it wrong for me to have favorites?).
Each leader will gather a group of staff together that can help with the testing. We're going to compile a list of features that need to be funcitonal and then develop a plan to test them and submit any problems so they can (hopefully) be fixed. In addition, each group is going to look at enhancements available with the new catalog that we may want to implement. For instance, the new version of the patron catalog should be able to show more DVD images in the search results.
My next steps are to identify staff that would be interested in testing the new patron catalog. If you are interested in helping, send me an email and I can explain more what would be involved.
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