Quicksearch Ingest Activity for February

Orbis:

83,928 records updated or added
4,334 records deleted
52 ingest errors

Morris:

9,583 records updated or added
784 records deleted
0 ingest errors

Changes to records from Orbis and Morris are transferred to Quicksearch daily. Errors preventing ingest are usually an empty subfield or empty delimiter.

Quicksearch Ingest Activity for January

Orbis:

64,436 records updated or added
9,403 records deleted
44 ingest errors

Morris:

4,786 records updated or added
154 records deleted
1 ingest error

Changes to records from Orbis and Morris are transferred to Quicksearch daily. Errors preventing ingest are usually an empty subfield or empty delimiter.

Quicksearch January Update

Dear Colleagues,

I’m happy to announce that Quicksearch will become the default search on the Library Front Door on Tuesday, January 12th!

What does this mean?

As of January 12th, the library front door will have a new design, courtesy of the User Experience Advisory Group.  You can see a preview of the new design at http://dev.library.yale.edu.  Although Quicksearch will be the default search on the Library Front Door, links to Orbis, Morris, and Articles+ will still be prominent on the new page.

More details about the latest Quicksearch developments…

Members of the Quicksearch Implementation team and many other library staff worked hard in November and December to get Quicksearch ready for this day, and I’d like to highlight some of their efforts.

Requests – Orbis, Morris, Scan and Deliver, and Aeon request links have been added to Quicksearch!  The request links themselves have been added in the holdings area, next to the locations they are associated with.  Thanks to Yue Ji, Lakeisha Robinson, Tracy MacMath, and Scott Matheson who helped develop the request links and the new holdings area layout.  Thanks also to all the staff across the library system who participated in testing the new request links, and who gave feedback about their placement.

Books+ Search Analysis group documentation – the Books+ Search Analysis group, led by Arcadia Falcone, finished posting their documentation to the Cataloging at Yale web site.  You can see a detailed description of Quicksearch indexing at http://web.library.yale.edu/cataloging, under Discovery Systems Documentation.  The documentation describes both indexing changes made this fall at the group’s recommendation, and those that are still under consideration for future implementation.  Many thanks to everyone on the group for their hard work.

SearchFest – our final SearchFest was held November 17th.  This was the fifth and final Quicksearch SearchFest – many thanks to Jenn Nolte for leading these pizza and fun-filled learning opportunities, and thanks to all the staff who participated and presented their own tips and tricks for searching in Quicksearch!!

Infrastructure – we are working closely with ITS to identify issues related to occasional 5-10 minute outages of the alias search.library.yale.edu.  Quicksearch itself is still up, as is the ITS load balancer, but the alias is locked.  Thanks to Bob Rice for taking the lead on this issue.  On the bright side, Quicksearch server performance testing concluded successfully in late November with our individual servers handling a load at 20% above the maximum number of simultaneous users experienced historically by Orbis during the busiest time of the year.

User Experience Advisory Group – thanks to this group led by Steven Wieda, who, in addition to creating the new layout on the Library Front Door, also reviewed the layout and appearance of the new additions and features in Quicksearch this fall.

Finally, thanks to all of the Library staff who have participated by providing feedback this year.  The project wouldn’t be where it is without all of you!

Next up – this is not the end of the Quicksearch project, merely another important stage.  As we move through the winter and spring months, Quicksearch will continue to address outstanding issues and add new features, including the addition of a new digital materials bento box from the Findit digital interface.

Quicksearch Ingest Activity for December

Orbis:

89, 057 records updated or added
10,138 records deleted
61 ingest errors

Morris:

3,375 records updated or added
134 records deleted
0 ingest errors

Changes to records from Orbis and Morris are transferred to Quicksearch daily. Errors preventing ingest are usually an empty subfield or empty delimiter.

New documentation available for librarians and library staff

New documentation for Quicksearch is now available on the Cataloging  @ Yale site, under Discovery Systems Documentation. This documentation is aimed at librarians and staff, and answers questions such as:

When I search “Author”, what MARC fields am I searching? (Quicksearch Search Indexes)

Where do the facet terms come from? (Quicksearch Facet Indexes)

Why are all the RDA records at the end when I sort results by publication date? (Quicksearch Sort Indexes)

How does Quicksearch decide which format terms to assign to a resource? (Quicksearch MARC Format Mapping)

I made a change in Orbis…when can I expect to see it in Quicksearch? And how can I make sure my record won’t fail to ingest into Quicksearch? (How and When Cataloging Data Appears in Quicksearch)

Why aren’t all my search terms in some of my results? And what special syntax can I use to improve my searches? (Quicksearch Expert Search Tips)

What really happens when I click the search button in Books+? And how does the Quicksearch relevancy ranking work? (Technical Overview of Searching in Quicksearch and Books+)

How can I keep up to date with Quicksearch developments? (Quicksearch Project Blog)

Where do I point patrons for more information? (Public Quicksearch Help Site) (work in progress)

Many thanks to Dominique Bourassa for transforming these documents into Drupal, the members of the Books+ Search Analysis Working Group for their work on documenting the Quicksearch Solr indexes, and attendees of SearchFest for informing this documentation through their presentations and questions!

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 full reload statistics

During the last week of October, Quicksearch was refreshed with a complete reload of records from Orbis and Morris, and a new indexing configuration was implemented. Following the reload, a complete audit of the Solr index identified any records that were not correctly transferred to or deleted from Quicksearch.

Orbis:

9,843,283 records extracted
9,841,924 records initially loaded
343 ingest errors for correction (a significant drop since the last reload, thanks to the ongoing efforts of CMS and other technical services staff)
Remaining difference re-extracted

Morris:

499,410 records extracted
498,941 records initially loaded
Remaining difference re-extracted

Quicksearch Ingest Activity for October

Data is through October 26th, after which the daily ingest was put on hold for a full reload of records into Quicksearch from Orbis and Morris.

Orbis:

122,633 records updated or added
1,348 records deleted
68 ingest errors

Morris:

8,370 records updated or added
156 records deleted
106 ingest errors

Changes to records from Orbis and Morris are transferred to Quicksearch daily. Errors preventing ingest are usually an empty subfield or empty delimiter.

Quicksearch ingest activity for July and August

Now that the daily Quicksearch ingest audit has been up and running for several weeks, we have data to share! These statistics demonstrate not only the volume of records going into Quicksearch, but also the work that Yale and Law Library staff put into creating, editing, and managing records in Orbis and Morris. The count of records added to Quicksearch includes all records that were created, loaded, updated, or unsuppressed during this time period.

And now, the numbers:

From Orbis, 99,271 records were added to Quicksearch in July, and 89,486 in August. July saw 357 records failing ingest due to MARC errors (usually an empty subfield or rogue delimiter lurking somewhere), 77 of which were corrected by Catalog & Metadata Services staff. The remainder are preliminary order records that will be updated when the item is received, or records that triggered an error on multiple occasions. August’s error count was 107, of which 40 were corrected. The deletions for July were 2,540, with 1,779 records deleted in August.

From Morris, July’s additions numbered 6,944, with 224 deletions. The August counts were 17,829 records added, and 111 deleted. For both months Law maintained a clean slate with no errors logged.

Grand totals: 106,215 new or updated records in Quicksearch in July, and 107,315 more in August.

ETA: These monthly statistics are derived from a daily audit of Quicksearch loads, so if the same record is updated in Orbis or Morris several times over multiple days, each day on which it has new changes triggers re-ingest into Quicksearch and adds one to the tally.