jessamynwest
commented
4 years ago Speaking as someone who has interacted with a lot of Advanced Search fields in library catalogs, and would like to see one on OL, I think this could benefit more refinement. If you're offering more options for search I think OL people should think more about search strategy generally and about how people look for more information.
Right now, as a counterpoint, the Advanced Search on the Internet Archive basically dissuades people from searching because so much of it is inside baseball for IA superfans. Additionally search results pages are super confusing, limiting only sort of works and there are two kinds of searches (i.e. for a known item and for a general idea that are undifferentiated
We want to offer a good searching experience for users and some of these criterion are a lot more important than others (plus, really big search boxes are more friendly to more users). So, within this example
- collapse # of pages and pagination into one (with a max/min setting)
- allow subtitle to be searched within title (no reason not to,most people don't care about the difference)
- what is search by image supposed to do?
- needs to differentiate between controlled vocabulary (i.e. author, language) and not (location, publisher) because you can do fuzzy match with non-controlled vocabulary but controlled vocabulary should drop a user into a list
- is text "full text" here? If not, how does this differ from the current full text search (which right now goes to results from IA and not OL)
- when people are entering multiple values will the result AND them or OR them (this is crucial, users should be able to choose either which also means limiting to fewer fields so that it doesn't just grind away at server resources)
Many if these can be lumped into a really strong/effective "keyword" search which is how library and database catalogs do it. Or an iterative search strategy where you have a user do a search and then limit the results by the facets that are available.
tl;dr OL needs to have a mapped out Search strategy before getting too deep into building an advanced search.
BrittanyBunk
LeadSongDog
tfmorris
Related to #541, #2099.
Now that I use the Advanced Search feature more, I realize it's not adequate enough to look for works/editions. Here's my proposal to add:
*I didn't add this one to the picture (ran out of space), but "list" and "OCLC" should be fields too.
I took out some that I felt aren't as important, but it's ok to keep them. I'm hoping these additions will help someone who has some information about a book (but not a lot, and it's not covered in the current Advanced Search layout) to be able to take the multiple bits of limited info that they have to group it together into a search that helps them find what they're looking for. The ones I added in are what I feel would help me out, but if there's something that would help people more, don't feel limited by what I posted - it's ok to add in.