Re: opac live search

From: Pamela Sandene Mydock <pm_at_nyob>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:07:37 -0500
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Hello Fiona,

I only read the first paragraph of your email before giving your catalog 
a test run.  My results were very strange, because I typed in a title - 
On the Road (by Jack Kerouac). 

I got back this message under the query box:
*Subject*: Tariff on road-rollers Australia

which took me to:


        Vibratory road rollers (developing country preferences), 2
        November 1981 <http://find.lib.uts.edu.au/search.do?R=OPAC_b1136031>


Not Jack Kerouac!  It might improve user experience (even tho' it is 
only beta) to include a brief message that explained the current 
subject-author limitation on search terms.  I guess I should have 
expected no title hits when the response to typing the first three 
characters -- "on (with a space for third character)" -- I got a bunch 
of *Author* hits with surname "On".  This could be a problem finding an 
author with a Korean surname that is a single letter "O".

But back to Jack Kerouac.  If I were silly enough to misspell his name as

    * *Author*: Glastonbury, Keri.
    * *Author*: Hulme, Keri, 1947-
    * *Author*: Pearlson, Keri.
    * *Author*: Phillips, Keri
    * *Author*: Spooner, Keri

I stop getting new hits at Kerow...

Looks promising, however. 

Best regards,

Pam



Fiona Bradley wrote:
> Hi Mike,
>
> We have autocomplete on our brand-new beta catalogue -
> http://find.lib.uts.edu.au/
>
> It is implemented using the Yahoo UI Library Autocomplete control.
> Right now we are providing results for subject and author, but we are
> continuing to refine this feature and may add other options like
> title.
>
> regards,
> Fiona
>
> Research & Policy Officer
> University of Technology Sydney
>
> 2009/2/19 Mike Cunningham <mcunningham_at_cambridgelibraries.ca>:
>   
>> I thought someone on this list might be interested in this. I now have a
>> proof of concept running on our staging port of an autocomplete/live search
>> feature for the opac. You may have seen this type of feature on sites like
>> Amazon or Zip.ca. It comes back with different results depending on which
>> search field the user selects (title, keyword, author, subject, call
>> number). Since there is no keyword index per se, keyword also uses the title
>> index. The feature kicks in after the user has typed at least 3 characters.
>>
>> I'm curious if anyone knows of other library catalogues that do something
>> like this. Someone pointed out to me that BiblioCommons has a feature like
>> this. Does anyone know of others?
>>
>> You can try it out here:
>>
>> http://search.cambridgelibraries.ca:2082/search
>>
>> There is some background info on the feature here:
>>
>> http://ex-libris.ca/?p=694
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> --
>> Mike Cunningham
>> Web Services Librarian
>> Cambridge Libraries
>>
>>     
>
>   
Received on Thu Feb 19 2009 - 11:10:02 EST