[245] in Information Retrieval
Re: mosaic catalog
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (jamess@MIT.EDU)
Fri Jul 22 09:51:56 1994
From: jamess@MIT.EDU
To: elibdev@MIT.EDU, OWLS-L@mitvma.mit.edu
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 94 09:48:46 EDT
Tom Owens wrote:
> I've been playing with the hyperpals online catalog
> available at http://bingen.cs.csbsju.edu/pals/hyperpals.html
> on the web. ... I'd be interested in hearing, on this list, what people
> think of it. I like the cleanness of the design, but I see some problems
> at an early glance:
>
> 1. Boolean searching across fields cannot be done on
> individual searches,leading to a few complexities.
This is a function of the CGI search engine behind the script. I'm
sure a more Willow-like search engine could be run. The key is how the
user's request is parsed by the search engine. His script seems to rely on
PALS' native search engine. A similar implementation of GEAC would restrict
the user to single keywords, an inherent feature of the public search engine.
You can do worlds of things with direct,indexed access to the records.
Exploiting WWW would allow us to provide Boolean capabilities to all
users via Lynx, Mosaic, etc. It would allow the developers to focus on the
CGI search engine design and not client platform considerations. It also is
easily extensible to linking with other library services much as we hoped the
Notis Horizon product would.
> 2. The MARC to html -- or whatever -- conversion works
> indifferently well, causing some bizarre record displays.
This is also a CGI-side programming issue. It comes down to how the
database delivers the results of the query to the server for beautifying
before transmission to the WWW client. HTML is not a sophisticated
formatter so there are restrictions there as well.
But I like the way that you can click on an author to see other
books they've authored, click on the call number to get a shelf listing,
click on the subject headings to see related books. It is quite nice (and
clever on the programmer's part). It's more logical than having to return
to the top menu and work down to scan another index.
> Very interesting approach however, and I'd be interested in knowing
> what ref desk staff think.
> thanks, Owens
I think it is a user friendly system which--with a good search engine--
would make a marvelous public catalog. My thoughts. While we're at it, we
can introduce an interface for ILB/RSC requests, suggested purchases, a job
application form for students, connections to e-journals, the new gopher, ...
[Note: I'm forwarding this to OWLS-L since this list goes to the majority
of reference staff. The comments and feedback would be useful for both
groups.]
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