Author: Kalee Sprague

Quicksearch Upgrade Completed

Kalee Sprague

Quicksearch was successfully upgraded on September 6, 2017!

The upgrade included two major new features: Advanced Search and the new Database list. Several small but useful new features were also added. Here are a few new features that you may not have noticed yet:

  • Hathi Trust links to digital versions of titles in Orbis or Morris are now available. The link text indicates whether full text is available or if Hathi only provides access to a citation. The Hathi display also includes information about the institution that owns the original. See the screenshot below or view an example in Quicksearch.

Hathi Trust links to digital versions of titles in Orbis or Morris are now available.

  • You can now click on Local Subject headings to find like titles, just as you can with LCSH and MESH headings.

• You can now click on Local Subject headings to find like titles

  • You can also search sub-collections in a single location using Advanced Search. Choose one Location in the “Limit results by section,” then select “Location” from the drop-down menu next to the search box on the right. NOTE: You will need to know the sub-collection name in order for this to work. For example:

  • The upgrade also includes an easily accessible, stable link to the individual record in the ‘Bookmark As’ field, making it easier to share a direct link to a record with colleagues, students, faculty, and researchers. Look for this stable link at the bottom of each Books+ record.

• The upgrade also includes an easily accessible, stable link to individual record in the Bookmark As field

 

  • Numbered results makes it easier to discuss a result page with colleagues or patrons. Check boxes for emailing results or adding citations to your Saved list have been moved to the left next to result numbers in order to enhance usability.

• Numbered results makes it easier to discuss a result page with colleagues or patrons.

 

The Quicksearch Advisory Group would like to hear what you think about these and other new features in the upgrade.  We’d like to hear any and all feedback, including bug reports and change suggestions.

Thanks again to all of the people who helped with the upgrade, particularly the members of the Quicksearch Technical Implementation Team and the Quicksearch Advisory Group.

Suzanne Lovejoy and Kalee Sprague, co-chairs of the Quicksearch Advisory Group

Quicksearch Advisory Group members: Lori Bronars, Ellen Cordes, Gwyneth Crowley, Moira Fitzgerald, Lindsay King, Colin McCaffrey, John Nann, Youn Noh, Angela Sidman, Tim Young

New Quicksearch Advisory Group

Kalee Sprague

The Quicksearch Advisory Group was formed this July to guide and promote the ongoing operation and development of Quicksearch.  The group will act on behalf of all Quicksearch stakeholders by defining and prioritizing the ongoing development, configuration, integration, and support of this important service.

Committee members include: Gwenyth Crowley, Ellen Cordes, Moira Fitzgerald, Emily Horning, Jordan Jefferson, Suzanne Lovejoy (co-chair), Youn Noh, Danielle Ray, Angela Sidman, Laura Sider, and Kalee Sprague (co-chair).

Minutes for our meetings will be posted on the Quicksearch blog at http://campuspress.yale.edu/libraryunifiedsearch.

Everyone is welcome to contact the committee with feedback, either by contacting committee members directly,  or through the ‘Feedback’ link in the Quicksearch header and footer.

 

Library IT cross-training Internship comes to a close

Kalee Sprague

Jason Eiseman, Head of Technology at the Lillian Goldman Law Library, recently completed a cross-training Internship with Library IT.

The two-part focus of the internship was to learn more about the Quicksearch project, and more about how Library IT does its work in general.

The cross-training experience was a great success. 

Jason worked on making a number of links in Quicksearch open in new windows, updated a MARC analysis spreadsheet and improved MARC tag mapping in Quicksearch, and assisted in checking and enhancing some of the Quicksearch documentation.  Most importantly, he  developed a new Rails app that improved the connection between Quicksearch and the law library’s MORRIS catalog.

If you would like more information, Jason will be doing a presentation on his internship at the Tech Talk on August 17th.

It was a pleasure for all of us to work with Jason, and we look forward to collaborating with him in the future!

Findit Digital Collections now in Quicksearch

Kalee Sprague

The Quicksearch Implementation team  and Library IT are happy to announce that collections from the Findit digital repository are now available in Quicksearch!

You can view digital collections in Quicksearch by going to the library front door at http://web.library.yale.edu, or directly to the Quicksearch main page at http://search.library.yale.edu, and searching for a term like “Andy Warhol”.

Three result bento boxes now display, Books+, Articles+, and Digital Collections.

Clicking on the “See xxx results” link in the Digital Collections bento box, or the “Digital Collections” facet in the left hand menu, will bring you to the full Digital Collections page.  The Digital Collections page provides facets that match the facet functionality in Findit.  Clicking on a title link will bring you into the Findit interface.

 

Findit Integration in Quicksearch

Kalee Sprague

The Quicksearch Implementation Team, working with a number of staff in Library IT, is beginning the integration of Findit in Quicksearch!  Two groups of stakeholders will initially vet plans for the integration of Findit – an ad-hoc group of Findit stakeholders, and the User Experience Advisory Group.  The integration of Findit will be based on queries against the Findit solr index.  Findit results will appear in Quicksearch in their own bento box, tentatively labeled “Digital Collections”.  An intermediary search results page will allow users to narrow their search using facets.  When a user clicks on an individual digital object title, they will go to the object page in the native Findit interface.   They can then use bread crumbs, full text searching, and other features that are native to Findit.  As has been the case with Orbis, Morris, and Articles+, the native Findit interface will still be available from the Library Front Door.  The project is estimated for completion in mid-late April.  A round of user studies will shortly follow the production implementation.

 

Quicksearch Live on the Library Front Door

Kalee Sprague

Quicksearch is now the default search on the Library Front Door!

The unified search and discovery tool is now available as part of a new search box re-design at http://web.library.yale.edu.  Although Quicksearch is the default search, links to Orbis, Morris, and Articles+ are still prominent on the page.

In addition to going live on the Front Door, Quicksearch has an exciting new feature.  It is now possible to place Orbis, Morris, Scan and Deliver, and Aeon requests directly within the Quicksearch interface!  Request links for these individual services are available below the holdings location and call number information in individual title pages.  For an example, see http://search.library.yale.edu/catalog/8518891.

The roll out of Quicksearch on the front door represents a major milestone in the Quicksearch project.  Many thanks to everyone who has participated in the project to date, as part of a task force, testing group, implementation team, or by providing comments and feedback!

 

Quicksearch Update November 2015

Kalee Sprague

The Quicksearch implementation team has been busy this fall with two major projects.

The first project was to improve the indexing of Morris and Orbis records. Work began with the Books+ Search Analysis Working Group, a broad-based team of technical services stakeholders, led by Quicksearch team member Arcadia Falcone.  The group wrote a recommendation document highlighting changes to searching, faceting, and sorting in Quicksearch.  The changes were then reviewed by the Cataloging Coordinating Committee and the User Experience Advisory Committee.  The approved recommendations were then implemented by Quicksearch team members in a series of code updates and a full extract and re-load of over 10.3 million Morris and Orbis records.  A new Subject (Local Yale) facet is just one of the recommended changes now available in Quicksearch.  A few recommended changes related to facet and sort labels are still in progress and will be available in production Quicksearch within the next week.

This fall the team has also been busy improving the layout, design, and content of holdings in the Quicksearch single item view.  A new streamlined design was introduced to Quicksearch earlier in the fall, with improved indentation designed to make it easier to see individual holdings for items with numerous holdings statements.  Holdings notes relating to the Provenance and description of individual special collections items were also added to the holdings display.  Finally, the mobile view of holdings has been revised, and is continuing to undergo review.

Currently on the development front – the team has now embarked on the project to implement Aeon and Scan and Deliver requests in Quicksearch.  In addition to adding new request types, we will re-design the request links in the item view, making the options to request from Orbis, Morris, Scan and Deliver or Aeon, easier to find and use for our patrons.  We hope to make all of these request types available in time for our January roll-out of Quicksearch.

 

MORRIS HOLDINGS NOW AVAILABLE IN QUICKSEARCH!

Kalee Sprague

Morris holdings now appear in Quicksearch!

The best way to view this new feature is to search for a law-related topic like ‘Human Rights Law’ in Quicksearch, http://search.library.yale.edu.

In the Search Results list you will now see real-time availability information.    A red ‘x’ appears if the title is checked out, and a green check mark displays if the title is available.

morris_search_results.fw

In the individual holdings screen, you can see the location, call number, and status of the title pulled directly in real time from Morris.

morris_title_holdings.fw

This is an important milestone in the Quicksearch project ;  the two Yale Library catalogs, Orbis and Morris, are both now fully represented in Quicksearch.

Quicksearch Update April 2015

Kalee Sprague

Several new features and bug fixes were rolled out in the first two weeks of April.

We did a full extract and re-load of all Orbis and Morris records, in order to take advantage of several changes we made in response to user Feedback.

To highlight a few of the changes made possible by the re-load:

  • All records will now have an Acquisitions Date, so sorting by Acquisitions Date will make more sense when sorting by ‘Acquired earliest’
  • URL Links stored in the MFHD are now extracted and will appear in the holdings section of the item view.
  • We updated the format mappings and labels for two formats – “Archives or Manuscripts” and “Dissertations & Theses”.  For more information about format mapping changes, see: How Quicksearch Assigns Format Facet Terms
  • We updated language mapping to add ISO 693-2 codes
  • We added 69x local subject fields to the Subject Index
  • We fixed the Google Books bug that sometimes caused the incorrect book cover to display

The total number of records extracted and re-loaded was:

Morris records: 459,491
Orbis records: 9,787,510

For a full list of bugs fixed in the April update, see the Quicksearch 4.0 Release Notes.

January New Features in Quicksearch beta

Kalee Sprague

The following new features and bug fixes have been rolled out in January:

  • We have greatly improved relevancy ranking for known phrase searches like Journal titles.  A typical example of this is a search for the Journal title ‘Nature’ which has long been a source of frustration in Orbis because so many titles in the Library catalog contain that word.  A search for ‘Nature’ in Quicksearch beta now brings the Online version of the Journal up as the first hit in the Catalogs result list!  Give it a try: http://search.library.yale.edu/quicksearch?q=nature&commit=
  • Another great new feature: you can now access Full Text materials like the online version of ‘Nature” directly from the Quicksearch results list.
    Screenshot QS beta
  • Quicksearch beta response time has also been greatly improved! Thanks again to everyone who reported and/or pitched in to help out with this issue.
  • All fields that display in Orbis now display in Quicksearch beta
  • Several small layout and style issues have been addressed

via January New Features in Quicksearch | Quicksearch Project.