Free Range Librarian

K.G. Schneider’s blog on librarianship, writing, and everything else, since 2003.

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How OPACs Suck, Part 1

March 13, 2006 at 12:36 pm by K.G. Schneider · 9 Comments ·

On ALA TechSource I’ve posted the first in a series explaining how OPACs suck. Extra credit if you figure out the catalogs I used for my examples (no, you can’t say NCSU, since I make that explicitly the non-sucky example).

Posted on this day, other years:

Tags: Search 4 Search

9 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Rikhei // Mar 13, 2006 at 3:20 pm

    I think I’m going to try to stop guessing, because the more OPACs I look at the more baffled I am with the results. Searching the SFPL catalog brought up books about Paul McCartney and peanut butter.

  • 2 kgs // Mar 13, 2006 at 4:23 pm

    That SFPL search is truly wacky. I looked at the first result and saw that “million” is in the notes field. I’m going to talk about field weighting pretty soon because it is another standard search engine functionality that can greatly improve search results.

  • 3 Diedre // Mar 14, 2006 at 5:25 pm

    Well, we will see if this comment from me gets lost as some others seem to have.

    I think you are on the right track. I just heard a rumor a few minutes ago, and it is a rumor, that at least one ILS company is investigating using a better search engine. We can only hope.

  • 4 kgs // Mar 14, 2006 at 7:32 pm

    Diedre, to my knowledge, the only comments of yours that were (briefly) lost–and later found and immediately posted–were the ones trapped when I upped the junk filter–and yours were just many of a big pile of comments. Everything else has been posted. When I fixed the junk-filter problem, I even scanned the FRL junk filter all the way back for months just to make sure, and I’ve been eyeballing it every week since then. If there’s a comment you feel you made that hasn’t been posted, give me some hints and I’ll make a second search for it.

    Yeah I heard that a certain vendor would be adding search to its product. Good on Andrew Pace to shame them in that direction.

  • 5 Debbi // Mar 14, 2006 at 7:38 pm

    For what it’s worth, Innovative Interfaces has improved their keyword searching to use a new relevancy ranking algorithm. We’ve got it running in test right now, but you can see it in production at Westerville Public. It’s a definite improvement over their old keyword approach.

  • 6 kgs // Mar 14, 2006 at 8:00 pm

    I had heard that. It’s definitely an improvement. I would have to hope that a Walt Underwood or some other blogging SE specialist weighs in, but I’m wondering if decent SEs also consider things like position within results for single-word searches. It’s good to see a spellchecker, too–high time. (That was next on my list.) The spellchecker page looks like a ransom note, but I don’t know if that’s you or them (and if it’s you, I understand, This Is Test Mode).

  • 7 Diedre // Mar 16, 2006 at 8:36 pm

    Sorry, Karen, I really wasn’t blaming you that a posting or two by me did not appear. I figured it was the fact that I was on the verge of a cold and didn’t ever click post or the barametric pressure or something along those lines. One that didn’t appear was totally brilliant but now no one will ever see it because I am not going to rewrite it. Yeah, brilliant. ;-)

  • 8 kgs // Mar 16, 2006 at 8:53 pm

    I don’t feel blamed, I just feel the need to explain my due diligence at this point until we’re all convinced–particularly I–that I’m not letting the comments that do come in here go into the bit-bucket. :-)

  • 9 Diedre // Mar 23, 2006 at 12:50 pm

    The announcement, that I alluded to earlier, came out yeaterday about SirsiDynix making changes in searches. Here is one article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20060323/tc_cmp/183702055

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