Category Archives: Documentation

How Quicksearch beta Works

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.

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!

How Quicksearch Assigns Format Facet Terms to Records

Quicksearch handles formats, such as “Books” or “Audio,” in a modular, layerable structure that is very different from Orbis. For example, manuscript maps are not treated as a separate format from print maps or other manuscript materials, but rather have both the “Archives or Manuscripts” and “Maps & GIS” formats assigned, and can be accessed through either facet or a combination of the two. During the record ingest process, a script analyzes the MARC data to determine which format terms to apply to the record, according to conditions described in the format mapping documentation linked below. This mapping was developed in collaboration between the Quicksearch Implementation Group and the Discovery & Systems Metadata Group, drawing upon MARC documentation, local practices, metadata analysis, and Yufind discussions. It continues to be refined as Quicksearch develops.

Quicksearch MARC Format Mapping Documentation