Quicksearch Beta Links on Library home page February 5

Library IT and the Quicksearch Implementation team are preparing to do a code rollout for Quicksearch Beta next week.

After the code rollout staff will test Quicksearch beta. When it is determined that the code rollout was successful, our new web developer Steve Wieda will be putting a link to Quicksearch beta on the YUL homepage http://web.library.yale.edu/ the following Thursday February 5th. This will begin the public beta testing period for Quicksearch!

The link will be under the search box in “Search Orbis Catalog” section on the left side of the page. It will read “Try Quicksearch beta!” Clicking on this link will take you to http://search.library.yale.edu/.  Links will also be available in the ‘Research’ box on the home page, and from the ‘Research’ drop-down in the header.

A description of the latest Quicksearch features is available in the Quicksearch blog at http://libraryunifiedsearch.commons.yale.edu/.  The major enhancement rolling out next week will be to re-name the ‘Catalogs’ section to ‘Books+’.  We are making this change based on undergraduate and graduate student feedback in user studies this fall.  A number of other small interface changes will be made as well.

Over the next several weeks, we will be offering brief information / demo sessions.  Stay tuned for more information on dates.

Please note that because Quicksearch is still in Beta, it will be supported from Monday – Friday, 8am-5pm only.  It will also be subject to outages as we continue to address issues and add new features.

January New Features in Quicksearch

 

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 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.

qs_full_text

  •  Quicksearch 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
  • Several small layout and style issues have been addressed