What’s in Quicksearch? MORRIS records

The Law Library’s catalog, MORRIS, holds just over 900 thousand bibliographic records. When you view the entire Lillian Goldman Law Library location facet in Quicksearch, you’ll see only about 500 thousand records.

When merging the records from two different systems, we had to make some choices about what to send to the joint database that drives Quicksearch. Here’s a summary of what records are included from the Law Library catalog.

We did not send two large categories of records from MORRIS: sets of records we knew were already in Orbis, and temporary records for items on order. For example, MORRIS includes many Project MUSE ebook records. Because these are already in Orbis, we did not send these records from MORRIS. Some large sets of microform materials are excluded because they are duplicated by online materials. Serials Solutions records are also in both systems, but because Law and YUL holdings are synchronized in the Serials Solutions database, including only the YUL records will cover all the Law records.

There are also a few small sets of records for materials that are only available to law students and faculty. These are not currently loaded, but as we work out licensing issues, these sets will be added.

There is not currently any effort to de-duplicate records for titles that are held in both library systems, though this is a possibility for future development.

First full load of Orbis and Morris data!

The first full test load of Orbis and Morris data in the new Quicksearch discovery environment is complete!

There are 9.6 million titles from the Orbis Library Catalog and 500 thousand titles from the Morris Law Library Catalog in the test Quicksearch database. That brings the combined catalog total to a whopping 10.1 million titles.

There will be an opportunity in the next few weeks to participate in limited testing of the new combined search, followed by a rollout to Yulib for testing in late September.

Upcoming Project Schedule

The Quicksearch project is going to roll out over the course of the next year in several phases.  We will post more detailed schedule information about later phases of the project as it becomes available.

Here is an outline of our major goals right now:

Summer-Early Fall 2014

Summer has been a very busy time for the Quicksearch project!  We are focused on two major aspects of development.  First, we are working on getting catalog content into Quicksearch and displaying it correctly.  Specifically, we are finalizing the custom programs written to extract records from Orbis and Morris, and load them into the new Quicksearch interface.  Records from the two different library management systems will load using a normalized mapping scheme created by the Discovery and Systems Metadata group, so they are indexed in the same way- despite differences in cataloging practice between the two systems.

Second, we are working on some significant interface changes.  A complete re-design of the interface is underway, introducing a new, clean look with modern fonts and the Yale Library brand.  We are also focusing heavily on the dynamic display of item statuses in the search results list, so each item in the search results list will indicate whether it is checked out or available.  Finally, we are working to implement the recommendations of the Discovery & Systems Metadata committee for the display of fields and sub-fields in the individual record title views.

Fall 2014

YULIB Staff Rollout:  The Quicksearch interface will be rolled out for early review by YUL staff.  We look forward to getting your feedback!

Late Fall 2014 – Spring 2015

BETA Public Rollout:  Quicksearch will be rolled out for preview by faculty, students, and staff.   Close to the Beta release, we are planning to host information sessions for public services staff to highlight features and answer any questions.  Note that Orbis will still be the primary library catalog interface.  New features, and any bug fixes, will become available as they are completed.

Summer 2015

Production Rollout of Quicksearch:  Quicksearch becomes the primary catalog interface.  Orbis remains up and running, but will stay in the background.

Hello from the Quicksearch Project team!

HELLO 
The purpose of this blog is to communicate information and announcements about the Library’s Quicksearch Project. Each post to this blog will be contributed by the members of the Quicksearch Project team. Some posts will be paired with announcements to Yulib, but overall this blog will be the central place where communications about Quicksearch happen.

Please look for updates on the Quicksearch Project here and on Yulib over the summer and fall of 2014 as we work towards a rollout to YUL staff.

WHAT

The Quicksearch Project is the Library’s effort to unite several of its online services under one discovery interface. The product we are using to do this is an open source system called Blacklight.

Our peers at Columbia University have also brought up Blacklight and now run this system (with heavy customization) as their main search and discovery interface, called Clio. To take a look at where we are headed with Quicksearch, please visit Clio here and try some searches for yourself.

The services initially targeted for our new discovery interface include:

WORK
Our project team is working diligently to shape the code we started with into something that works with our own services. The project work involves, among many things:

  • server infrastructure and administration
  • programming in Ruby, Javascript and other coding languages
  • creation of interoperability paths (getting services to talk to each other)
  • careful analysis and mapping of metadata elements from one system to another
  • documentation

FEEDBACK
If you have questions, comments, or other feedback on the Quicksearch project, please click here to share them with the project team. You can also comment here on this blog.

TEAM
Kalee Sprague (Project Manager), Library IT
Lakeisha Robinson (Technical Lead), Library IT
Katie Bauer,  Library IT
Steve DiSorbo,  Library IT
Arcadia Falcone, Cataloging and Metadata Services
Mike Friscia, Library IT
Yue Ji, Library IT
Scott Matheson, Law Library
Jenn Nolte, Library IT
Bob Rice, Library IT