Hello,

We are new users to the PUI and noticed today (correct me if I’m wrong) that 
neither the old PUI nor the new PUI supports the ability for users to perform 
truncated searches without truncation operators like * and ?.  For example, one 
must type “histor*,” with quotes, to get search results containing the word 
history. One cannot merely type histor with no quotes (0 results).

Is this the case? Is there an existing ticket with a request to add this 
feature? And if this was a conscious decision not to have this feature, may I 
ask why?

Best,

Jordon

Jordon Steele
Hodson Curator of the University Archives
Special Collections
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N Charles St
Baltimore, MD 21218
410-516-5493
[email protected]

From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Custer, Mark
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2016 4:32 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Reference Staff training material?

I created something here for staff that addressed some of their questions about 
using advanced search in the staff interface.  A lot of their questions were 
particular to our local plugins, though, so those probably wouldn’t make much 
sense to everyone else.  However, in case it helps, here are two questions and 
answers from our current FAQ:


  1.  How do you truncate your search in ArchivesSpace?

You can truncate searches by using an asterisk (*) as a wildcard operator.  
Using this technique, you can perform truncations on the end of your search as 
well as the beginning (the left-hand side).  For example, you can search for 
pop* as well as *pop.

If doing the latter search, you might wonder if you can filter out all of the 
results that just contain the string pop in them (e.g. you want records that 
have lollipop and afropop in their description, but not any with the word pop). 
 Well, of course you can!  Just throw in the not operator, and re-run this 
search:  *pop NOT pop (upper-casing the Boolean here is required in our setup), 
which you can also write as *pop -pop:

http://sandbox.archivesspace.org/search?utf8=✓&q=*pop+-pop

ArchivesSpace uses Solr, which in turn uses Lucene.  So, any search operator or 
technique available with those technologies is likely to be supported by 
ArchivesSpace (depending on how Solr is configured, which can be customized by 
every ArchivesSpace installation).


2.      Can you put a search in quotes to get results for a specific phrase?

You betcha.  By default, ArchivesSpace is setup to increase recall for basic 
searches, so you might want to use quotes to drill down to a more specific 
result set.

Here’s an example:  I’m looking for references to the play Cher Antoine. If I 
put those keywords into the search box without quotes, I’m going to get results 
that have either Cher or Antoine in them – only one search term has to match to 
be considered a match – but the relevancy ranking will bring most of the 
results that contain the play’s name to the top. Still, if I don’t want the 
other results at all, I can wrap up the query in quotes like so:

http://sandbox.archivesspace.org 
search?utf8=✓&q=%22cher+antoine%22<http://sandbox.archivesspace.org%20search?utf8=✓&q=%22cher+antoine%22>

(in the above URL, the quote characters are the two instances of %22, which is 
how double quotes are encoded in URLs)

I realize that this isn’t the training information that you asked about, but I 
just thought I’d share in case it’s of any use.




From: 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
 [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Kari R Smith
Sent: Monday, 11 April, 2016 4:07 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group 
([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>)
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Reference Staff training material?

Hello,
Has anyone developed local training material for reference archivists?  If so, 
would you be willing to share it?  And / or is there official ArchivesSpace 
community training material for reference archivists?  Activities I’m thinking 
of are like:  complex searching in both the staff and public interfaces and 
producing reports  / output that is useful for researchers (like a limited box 
list, search results, etc.)

Thank you!

Kari R. Smith, Digital Archivist
MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections
617-258-5568  |   smithkr (at) mit.edu
http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/

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