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Browse Search: Subject, Author, Title

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Ruth edited this page Apr 26, 2024 · 10 revisions

Browse search is an advanced research tool which allows power users and library workers (and others who stumble on it) to navigate through our collections in different ways.

About How Browse is Used

...and why it's important

  • Subject: Because cataloging practice suggests using the most specific form of a subject and most non-catalogers don't have subjects memorized, subject browse is a good way to get a big picture. This is often used by experts and can be important for library workers assisting patrons. For example, if I browse search "immigration" in our catalog, I can see various different specific subjects in the results. This would be very helpful if I were trying to help a patron find the niche thing they're looking for without knowing the exact subject.
  • Author: Because we use controlled values for author names, this can be very helpful for finding the exact author you're looking for. It's another good one for power users and helping patrons. This should allow for wildcard/stemmed search of author names, e.g. Sanders, E*.
  • Title: While not as useful since we have a really good title search, this still has utility when we want to deal with items which have very common words in the title. What would be most useful here might be the left-anchored search so that people can put in common-word/one-word titles & the like and then get an alphabetically-ordered list of results.

Indexing Subjects

We will use the fullest form of the subject for Browse, probably using something like subject_facet.

Indexing Authors

We will index the full value of the 110/111/100 or 710/711/710. This seems to be combined in all_authors_facet.

Indexing Title

We will index the MARC 245ab for the title field. We have it in title_245ab_tsim, but we use title_sort which is configured as a facet but not in the Solr response.

Searching to Browse

We match from beginning of the string and the results will be alphabetical. So "Immigr" takes us to the first word beginning with it: https://catalog.libraries.psu.edu/browse/subjects?prefix=Immigr

Displaying Browse Results

In results, we put a couple items before the field so that people understand they're in the middle of thing and can navigate between them. Display numbers of results next to each so that people have an idea of how many they're going to be looking at. This is most important for subject, but would be useful for author.

Results ordering: alphabetical.

In Other Catalogs

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