+1 On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 1:13 PM, Kathy Lussier <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi all, > > I wanted to float an idea to the community. I spent a little time this > morning looking at a bug submitted earlier this year regarding the Matches > Exactly search option in the advanced search screen - > https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1267129. After thinking about > the problem, I came to a conclusion that I've drawn on similar occasions > when looking at previous problems with exact match searching that has since > been fixed. Overall, I think this search option along with, to a lesser > extent, the Starts With search option, is more likely to cause frustration > for users than to solve any search problems. > > I'm curious to know if others have found the same problems in their > libraries and, if so, if there is any willingness in the community to > remove those options in the advanced search screen to save frustration on > the part of users. > > My reasons for removing them are below: > > 1. The intent of this search option is to perform a left- and > right-anchored search on the search terms. The entered search terms need to > exactly match the index as it appears in the relevant metabib table. If > doing a title search, you need to enter the entire title including 245a and > 245b. I believe most users are unlikely to know what the subtitle is for a > book and a. The re more likely to enter just the words that are in 245a. > > 2. Right now, there is a bug with Matches Exactly. As of now, if you enter > the following terms in the search box: > > the joy of cooking > > the system will retrieve anything that begins with "the", ends with > "cooking" and also contains the words "joy of" in no particular order. I > just conducted a matches exactly search for the help today and, in addition > to retrieving "The Help" it also retrieved a record for "The Berenstain > Bears hurry to help." The fix for this particular issue is fairly easy, but > the fix also means that the Matches Exactly will become even more > unforgiving than what I outlined in #1 above. Punctuation will matter more. > In addition to entering all of the words in the 245a and 245b, the user > will also need to know where to add punctuation. From what I can tell, this > isn't consistent for all punctuation. In looking for the title "The assist > : hoops, hope, and the game of their lives" the following search works: > > "^The assist hoops, hope, and the game of their lives$" > > but these searches do not work: > > "^The assist : hoops, hope, and the game of their lives$" > > "^The assist hoops hope and the game of their lives$" > > It looks like the user needs to know that the colon should be removed, but > the commas should remain. > > 3. The "Starts With" search is a little more forgiving since a user is > more likely to know the start of a title rather than the entire string, but > it still suffers from the problems of a user needing to know what > punctuation should be entered (or not entered) for the string that they > type. Since it is a search that uses left-anchoring, it also does not > ignore non-filing indicators, which is something that users sometimes > expect it to do. Note: I was the person who added the "Starts With" search > to Evergreen, mainly as a way to ameliorate the issues we saw with the > "Matches Exactly" search. Now that Browse search is available in the > catalog, I don't think this particular search is necessary on the advanced > search screen anymore. > > 4. In a standard Evergreen installation where no custom indexes have been > added, both of these search options will probably fail for a keyword > search. This happens because, by default, there is one keyword index (the > blob) where all of the indexed terms for the record are stored, and there > is no way any user could know all of the terms that are stored there and > their proper order. If they are entering a title, they are more likely to > have successful Starts With keyword searches because the title seems to be > the first thing that starts off the blob, but if the user were entering any > other terms (author's last name?) for a Starts With keywords search, the > search will fail. > > Rather than present a search option to our users that has a higher > likelihood of leading to unsuccessful search results than our other search > options, I would like to see if there is willingness in the community to > remove these options in the next (March/April) release of Evergreen. > > Please feel free to share any feedback you have to this idea. > > Thank you! > Kathy > > -- > Kathy Lussier > Project Coordinator > Massachusetts Library Network Cooperative > (508) 343-0128 > [email protected] > Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/kmlussier > #evergreen IRC: kmlussier > > -- Rogan Hamby, MLS, CCNP, MIA Managers Headquarters Library and Reference Services, York County Library System “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis <http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1069006.C_S_Lewis>
