Wednesday 15 December 2010

Theme Focus: Search

Search functionality is a fairly fundamental element of each of the JISC LMS projects so it would be foolhardy of me to try and document every single blogpost. The blogposts I've linked to below give a good representation of the sorts of issues and challenges that the projects have been tackling.

One of the things that often comes up as soon as you get anywhere near a library search interface is the thorny issue of 'advanced search'. I am starting to wonder whether it is only librarians themselves who can truly love this feature. It would be interesting to look at usage stats to see whether advanced searches get as much usage as library staff think they do/should do [and also whether that usage is changing over time].

Making a user friendly 'advanced search' interface is a particularly thorny challenge. During inhouse training sessions the #SWWHEPSRCH project team got feedback that the iFind advanced search was 'a little confusing'. The #BFCESEARCH team also reported that few users chose to use the advanced search function, and those who did 'found the option boxes confusing'.

When the #BLATHULL project analysed the results of their usability testing they found that opinions were divided on the usefulness of a) a tag cloud and b) a display of 'recently added' bookcovers(they were comparing SearchWorks at Stanford University and VirgoBeta at the University of Virginia). If the users are divided in their feedback then this makes getting the interface right all the more difficult.

Of course, implementing a new search often uncovers all sorts of data conundrums:
- http://yocalcat.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/progress-report-search-interface/
- http://blacklightathull.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/union-search-and-revised-categories/

The UX2.0 project crafted some indepth technical guides to share how they're implementing faceted search, Apache Solr and Dublin Core Metadata:
- Part 1
- Part 2

The #AQUABROWSERUX project also shared their know how around how you can develop realistic user tests when looking at search functionality.

The #ENCLAVELMS team have written a relevant blogposts on whether wordclouds are the future of search and also their thoughts on what library search functionality could be usefully embedded within their VLE.

Lastly, just to mix things up a bit, here are a couple of high profile and large-scale beta search interfaces that may be of interest:
- http://library.wales.org/catcymru/
- British Library search beta

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