Category Archives: Tips and Features

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!

Morris Holdings now available in Quicksearch!

Morris holdings now appear in Quicksearch!

The best way to view this new feature is to search for a law-related topic like ‘Human Rights Law’ in Quicksearch: http://search.library.yale.edu.

In the Search Results list you can now see real-time availability information.    A red ‘x’ appears if the title is checked out, and a green check mark displays if the title is available.

morris_search_results.fw

In the individual holdings screen, you can see the location, call number, and status of the title pulled directly in real time from Morris.

morris_title_holdings.fw

This is an important milestone in the Quicksearch project ;  the two Yale Library catalogs, Orbis and Morris, are both now fully represented in Quicksearch.

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

New Feature in Quicksearch!

The Quicksearch Implementation team has rolled out a new feature in Quicksearch beta: Save Citations to a Bookbag! Now you have the ability to save all of your important items and search results to your own Bookbag. All you need to do is follow the steps below:

  • Sign-in with Yale Central Authentication Service (CAS), via the ‘Login’ button, and do a search.
  • Click into either the Catalogs search results or the Articles search results.
  • Check any of the boxes on the right of each item.
  • Hover over the ‘Selected Items…’ drop down and select ‘Save to Bookbag’.
  • Once the item(s) has been saved, you can access your Bookbag by clicking on the ‘Bookbag’ link in the green saved item box, or the ‘Saved Lists’ link in the upper right corner of the screen.

You can also save to your bookbag directly from a Catalog record:

  • Click on any item in the Catalog results, then click on the ‘Save to Bookbag’ link in the record view.
  • Once the item has been saved to Bookbag, you can access your Bookbag by clicking on the ‘Bookbag’ link in the green saved item box, or the ‘Saved Lists’ link in the upper right corner of the screen.
  • Note: the item-level Save to Bookbag feature works only in the Catalogs search

The Bookbag feature also has an additional feature: the ability to create your own named list. You can achieve this by following the steps below:

  • Go inside your bookbag and select the items you’d wish to save to an alternate list.
  • Once you’ve selected your item(s), click on the ‘Copy Selected Items…’ button and type in a new name for your selected items.
  • Once you hit the ‘Submit’ button, your new list is shown under the ‘Bookbag’ list on the left hand side of the screen.

We hope you enjoy this brand new feature!

– Quicksearch Implementation team

Things to try: custom new items lists and RSS feeds

Did you know that you can get a custom list of new items from Quicksearch? You can have it display on the screen by bookmarking your search after applying some limits and sorting, or you can have the information sent directly to the RSS feed reader of your choice. (Note RSS here is really simple syndication – a way to get updated information to your computer automatically, not Yale’s research storage service.)

 

You can get a list of newly acquired (not necessarily newly published) items that are relevant to you by running a catalog search in Quicksearch. Then apply a limit by Acquisition Date – perhaps “within 1 month.” You can add further limits too – perhaps only by location “Haas Arts Library.” Then choose sort by “Acquired Latest” to see the newest items added to the Quicksearch catalog. You can also adjust how many results display per page (this will also be the number of items sent to the RSS feed).

 

Once you have the search and limits just as you want it, you can bookmark the page or click the orange RSS icon RSS icon (right under “Previous” in the results header) to open the RSS feed in the program of your choice – for many that will be Outlook, though there are other options.

 

One last tip, not Quicksearch specific, is to replace your keyword search with a subject search – or limit by subject or call number – in order to produce more focused results. If subjects align well with your interest, consider removing the keyword search term altogether. For example, my test search of the past month’s acquisitions found 4 items with the keyword “copyright” and the subjects “copyright” or “intellectual property.” When I removed the keyword from the search, leaving only the “Acquisition Date” and “Subject” limits, I found four more on-point results – eight total, four that didn’t have the keyword “copyright” at all (items in non-English languages, for example).

 

Setup for a new items search

[click image to enlarge]

1. To search only by Library of Congress Subject Heading, leave the keyword search blank, or clear it.

2. This will set the maximum number of items in your RSS feed.

3. This sort will show the newest items acquired at the top of the list.

4. “Any of” these subjects will “or” the terms together, making a larger result set.

5. Here is the RSS icon that give you the feed address for this exact search.

6. Acquisition date limits will keep the list smaller.