Quicksearch Update November 2015

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.

 

Quicksearch Update April 2015

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.