theLinkResolver
commented
8 years ago @redlibrarian Related to this kind of documentation, and as we discussed in email, I've discussed with Ian the need to document an explanation of what we mean by "SFX journals" and the underlying collections and cataloguing policies. That it would be helpful to have this information captured in the appropriate context, so that it can be referred to from the discovery context without needing explanation within the discovery context (e.g. your clarification document).
I am pleased to report that this kind of documentation is intended to be part of a larger initiative to expand the scope of the Collections Information for Staff website to include Bib Services documentation. In the meantime, I will paste my own SFX explanation in this thread for @ualbertalib/discovery-testing to refer to.
Initial draft:
Bento Boxes, Formats, and Advanced Search
The new discovery system is designed to use data from multiple collections. Currently, the system presents results from the Symphony catalogue, the Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS), the SFX Link Resolver, and the list of databases in LibGuides.
However, the bento box design used on the main results page [image] breaks material down by format (book, ejournal, article, etc). Confusion arises because there is not a 1:1 mapping between data source and format. EDS and Symphony both contain more than just articles and books, and in fact some of the data sources overlap.
The ejournal pane contains only ejournals, and the database pane contains only databases, but for the books and more and articles and more panes, it's important to remember that those panes are predominantly books and articles, but also contain other formats.
The articles pane is also confusing because it is the only pane not populated with data we have a measure of control over. The results in the articles pane come from Ebsco Discovery Service, and are dependent on which databases are enabled or disabled in our EDS configuration. This also means that search options and filters are not the same as when searching the other collections. These too are dependent on how EDS is configured.
Because the articles pane uses EDS results, we can't use the same advanced search form for both EDS results and any of the other data sources. If you go to https://library.ualberta.ca/catalog?q=shakespeare, you will see results that include material from the books and more, ejournals, and database panes. This is because those three data sources are held locally, so we can search across all three collections at once. Because the EDS results are not stored locally, we can't search them at the same time as the other three data source.
(You may be asking why the main results screen contains results from all four data sources. This is because we built that page ourselves and it keeps all four data sources separate within the page. If you look at the other kind of result pages, you'll notices that they are limited to the data source they are searching.)
This leads us - for now anyway - to require two different advanced search pages. If you go to the main advanced search (https://library.ualberta.ca/advanced), you can search anything that's from one of our local data sources (Symphony, SFX, Databases). On that page, the green button that reads Go To Articles Advanced Search. That advanced search will search EDS.