Hi everyone
Yesterday I tried searching on the University of Toronto catalogue and I saw a very clever product in action. See how you can refine results, view book covers, and best of all see the detailed record view with the brief list still open. Try it and see
I hope we can have something like this sometime soon! AJ
It’s fantastic, I love it!
I love it too! Wonder what it costs…
Aren’t there better things we could spend the money on?
Adam, I suppose that depends on how much it costs! (but I’m guessing it’s a lot…)
If anyone’s wondering, Toronto are using Endeca. Other examples include:
North Carolina State University:
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/cat…
McMaster University
http://libcat.mcmaster.ca/
It doesn’t appear to have browsing?
This could be a pain when trying to find a particular author if a common surname/others with similar names.
John
Although you can’t seem to browse the full alphabetical index, you can refine results by author, etc (left hand side bar) and scroll through a list of matching results. That serves the purpose.
50 is the maximum number of items that can be viewed under "Refine" > "View More". So refining will not work well for users wanting a list of all works by an author with a common surname/first name combination — unless the user has another "hook" to search on.
Lack of browsability is a problem too for finding titles wherever they are very similar; UoT does not allow refining by title.
The extraction of separate subject subdivisions (e.g. "History And Criticism" or "Economic Conditions") under the "Subjects" block is a nice feature. But again I would find the 50 limit annoying, and issues arise from the precoordinated nature of LCSH (e.g. "Law And Legislation" is really the same as "Legislation"; a user may wonder why there is "History" as well as "History And Criticism").
Our existing catalogue enhanced with a "refine" feature would be superior, I think.
John
I agree that it’s the "refine results" sidebar that makes the Endeca catalogue so user-friendly (and the "new window" feature for detailed results). maybe someone should suggest that SirsiDynix add something like this to their package (if it’s not patented that is)
If we are looking at catalogues what do people think of this one…
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/
wow – it’s very similar to Endeca and VuFind is OPEN SOURCE!!! I vote for it!
Romy wondered about SirsiDynix doing something. Unfortunately it is not likely to happen. They are working on a similar interface (called ‘Enterprise’) but progress is incredibly slow, it doesn’t look that great’ and I suspect they have somewhat missed the boat in this arena. Peter
"Enterprise". Interesting name…Doesn’t sound like they’re living up to it
Yeah but maybe when they are finished it will have deflector shields and a transporter room…
Stanford University is using SirsiDynix with a VuFind overlay – http://searchworks.stanford…
Their project blog has a lot of interesting comments re problems, user feedback, etc
Deirdre
Just saw someone elsewhere talking about VuFind:
"I just got an (unauthorized?) sneak peek at our new OPAC front-end (VuFind). I really like what I saw in 5 minutes of use. LibraryThing tags! Reviews! Ratings! Cover art! Faceting! And it looks much easier to search. […] and Google Books preview! Okay I’ll stop now."
Deborah