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.