jvine@stanford.edu's blog

SearchWorks now has an advanced search feature, along with some other enhancements and corrections.

Based on user feedback and advice from the SearchWorks steering committee, we have prioritized these work efforts:

1. Advanced search (here is a preview; work is still in progress)
2. Improvements to access/availability information on the item detail page
3. "Nearby on shelf" functionality - browsing by call number around a selected item
4. Nightly catalog updates (currently the catalog is updated approximately weekly; circulation information is live)

The Google Books Preview button was not appearing in Internet Explorer (for books that have previews). This issue has been resolved.

We've replaced the core of SearchWorks with a new, better engine. This was done partly to give us a better foundation for future development, but there are some changes you'll notice right away.

• Tag cloud of libraries and collections on the home page - let us know what you think!
• Focus/refine options in the left column can be opened and closed with a click.
• A search breadcrumb helps you build and modify your search.
• Relevance ranking is better.

We've made scores of changes to SearchWorks based on your reports and requests during the past two weeks. The most visible ones include: 

• The search box has been made longer.
• The Search Subjects option is available again.
• The search selections breadcrumb appears on the item detail page as well as on the search results page.
• Search results can be sorted by date from new to old, or from old to new.

We really appreciate all the "AWESOME!" comments, but it's your requests and critiques that help set our development priorities. These are your (and our) top issues:

• Advanced search. (We are actively working on this, and plan to have it available in a Fall release.)
• View nearby items on shelf. (Actively working on this.)
• Select multiple items to send/cite/print, etc.
• Incremental updates to pick up new materials faster.
• More "cite this" formats.
• Better holdings and availability info for periodicals.

We've done a lot of work here in response to feedback from the Stanford community and usability testing conducted here and at University of Virginia.

• The complete bibliographic record is displayed in one page, no longer broken up into tabs. This means that all the information the searcher needs to make a decision about the current item is displayed on one page—no additional clicks required.
• The columnar display accommodates very long holding records and very long MARC records while maintaining consistent locations for key information.

The AND and OR Boolean operators are no longer supported in the quick search. All multi-word searches are “and” searches by default. Support for explicit AND and OR searches will be available with advanced search.

• The words 'and' and 'or' and 'not' (lower-case) are ignored as stop-words and are not considered as part of your search. Currently, 'NOT' (upper-case) can be used to exclude a word, but 'AND' and 'OR' (upper-case) are ignored.
• Minus (-) can be used as a prefix to exclude a word.

Two features had a negative usability impact and reduced user confidence in the search results:

• the ability to search keywords "in Subject";
• the "similar items" sidebar on the item detail page.

We will continue to look for a more effective way to provide this functionality.

The "Librarian View" of the MARC record has been replaced by a link to the XML view of the record for now. The XML layout will be replaced by a more readable display.

• "Did-you-mean?" suggestions are based on our own indexes rather than an external dictionary, and words are suggested only if they will return more results than the original word.
• Previous/Next links on the item detail page let you browse the result set one at a time without returning to the result list.
• Relevancy ranking is improved: exact matches are ranked before stemmed matches.
• Search breadcrumb shows the structure of your search and lets you remove elements without starting over.

SearchWorks development has been quiet on the surface for the last few months, but quite active behind the scenes. We’ve spent the last two quarters doing a technology switch "under the hood." Specifically, we replaced the VuFind engine (http://www.vufind.org/) that powered the first iteration of SearchWorks with Blacklight (http://blacklightopac.org/).

Searching and sorting of ae and oe ligatures has been corrected. For example:

• searching for Æon now gets the same results as Aeon
• searching for Coeurdevey gets the same results as Cœurdevey

These terms will also behave as equivalent values when results are sorted.

SearchWorks now allows you to sort your search results by year of publication. There are more changes coming soon, but sort-by-date has been such a frequently-requested feature that we wanted to make it available immediately. Let us know what you think; and stay tuned...

We've added OpenSearch support to SearchWorks - now you can add SearchWorks to your browser's built-in search box! When you're in SearchWorks, click on the down-arrow button next to the search box in your browser's toolbar, and select "Add SearchWorks." More detailed instructions are here: http://library.stanford.edu/opensea/.

We're doing some under-the-hood work this month - more changes coming soon.

More people are using SearchWorks now, and we're getting some very useful feedback. Thanks, and keep it coming!

• Is there a way to mark and mail/text a series of results? I can see how you can do the whole search or individual records but not a selected number.
• It's important to have the ability to select individual records from a search result and then be able to print, mail, etc. the selected list, not just item by item.
• Texts should include the call number.

• The "cite this" feature is awesome. Having this will make life a lot easier. It definitely deserves a very hearty thank you.
• The browse function is really useful. Congrats on the good job there. Consider offering a text only version and/or a one-line version once the user makes a search, so as to have a quicker grasp of related titles. An advanced search option where one can delimit the search by date, language, etc. would be useful. Also an "exact title" option.

We've had multiple requests for the ability to sort results by publication date! (And we will add it.)

• Great product. Will there be the option to filter or sort results according to publication date?
• Are there plans to be able to sort results by publication year?
• We must have date added to the sorting. Hugely important.
• It would be helpful to sort by date. I'm looking for old travel books on Africa.
• Please enable sort by publish date in the results field.

We've begun a program of regular usability activities around SearchWorks to help us improve and refine the interface. These activities include:

• usability tests (you complete a list of tasks using the product being tested, while the study administrator observes and asks questions)
• card sorting (you group terms into categories that make sense to you)
• paper prototypes (you "interact" with drawings of a hypothetical interface)
• interviews
• etc.

We're happy to report some progress on searching and display of vernacular (HA & CJK) scripts! SearchWorks now displays vernacular title, author, and publisher information in the search results and record view pages. In the record view, only the fields that display "above the tabs" are currently shown in vernacular - the remaining vernacular fields in the MARC record will be added soon to the Details and Subject tabs. You can search by vernacular scripts in the "everything" search; they have not yet been enabled for the specific field searches.

Several new features have been released to the production instance of SearchWorks today.

1. Export to RefWorks: Available from the full record view - you’ll be prompted to login to RefWorks (if you haven’t already), then SearchWorks will pass the complete bibliographic record (MARC) to RefWorks for upload.

Google's new book viewer is now in SearchWorks! You'll see a new tab (labeled "Full Text" or "Preview") in the record view for any books to which Google provides access. Click the tab to view the content. Here are a couple of sample records:

• Full Text of The turtles of Tasman

SearchWorks has been updated with the following changes:

• uniform title (240) has been added to records in the results list;
• when a user sorts the results list by title, author, etc. the sorted field is now bolded in each record in the list;
• sorting the results list by title sorts first by uniform title, then by the title proper;
• author links in the bibliographic record now search the author's name and display the results as a standard results list, with facets and sorting options;

SearchWorks has recently been updated with the following changes:

• Bug fixed: Removing certain facets from a search caused an error.
• Bug fixed: A search containing a semi-colon caused an error.
• Bug fixed: Book citations are now saved as books in Zotero, not as web pages.
• Search results for facets selected from the home page (with no search term entered) are now sorted by title.
• Sorting search results by author now also sorts each author's works by title.

New data snapshot from Socrates as of 9/30.

New index has improved punctuation issues in facets, resolved missing titles in title-sorted search results, and added more information to the uniform title displayed in the search results.

Also added fixes for a display problem with the tabs on the individual record page, and incomplete book covers displaying in Internet Explorer.

We've made some major improvements to the system performance in finding the results, loading the facets, and displaying book covers! We'll continue to work on improving the display of location and current status information in the search results.

The Call Number facets now include only Stanford-assigned call numbers. Library of Congress and Dewey numbers have been separated into two lists - let us know what you think about this.

Sort by Title has been added to the sort options on the search results page.