Primo demo at Vanderbilt
Marshall Breeding points out their test implementation of Ex Libris‘s new catalogue application, Primo: code-named Alphasearch, it is “the first time that a live Primo implementation has been made available to the general public.”
It does some manifestation grouping. Here are some search results for The Three Musketeers. Notice the link “11 versions in 3 languages published between 1893-1976.”
I find the interface awkward, especially its insistence on doing everything as a search, so I’ll leave further exploration up to you.
Oddly the result you highlight doesn’t seem to be related to the Three Musketeers (as far as I can tell). Also, what do you mean by “its insistence on doing everything as a search”? What other approaches are you thinking of?
Comment by Owen Stephens — 28 August 2007 @ 12:17 pmThat’s strange about the link. It gives me Elizabeth: Or, The Exiles of Siberia: A Tale Founded On Facts today, but I have no idea why. Something in the URL pointing to something that got reindexed, perhaps? Pressing Go on the search will refresh things.
If you pull up a fresh “three musketeers” search, scroll down to, for example, an edition of Twenty Years After (the sequel). There are two things I don’t like here.
First, I’m looking at a page describing a book, but there’s no simple permanent link to it. It seems to be the result of a search, not a direct link. (Tim Spalding of LibraryThing says something somewhere about linking to pages, not search results.) It could be that the URL actually is a direct link, but if so, it’s a terribly ugly one. The title of the book should be a hyperlink that takes me somewhere definite.
Second, my original search terms are still up there at the top of the page, apparently without having been refined to get me down to what I’m looking at. Confusing.
Comment by William Denton — 28 August 2007 @ 3:08 pmIt does seem like an oversite that there is no ‘Link to this item’ option – but if you use the option to ‘Push to del.icio.us’ in the Save area, you do get what looks like a persistent URL for the item:
http://alphasearch.library.vanderbilt.edu/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?fn=display&vid=VANDERBILT&doc=frbrmrg15946455
so I would guess you could offer a ‘bookmark this item’ option or similar if you wanted. What might be nice is if the URL could be nicely aliased so it was something like
http://alphasearch.library.vanderbilt.edu/display/VANDERBILT/frbrmrg15946455
This should be relatively easy for them to achieve.
I’m not sure if I agree with your comments on the search terms. If you explicitly narrow down the search then this does show, but if you view an item it doesn’t add in the item ID to the search terms. This makes sense to me – although I can understand why you feel it is confusing.
To drag myself back to more FRBR related issues, a search for Harry Potter shows both good examples of manifestation grouping, and it’s limitations. “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” lists three versions, which covers a book, an audio recording of the book, and the film. However, it fails to group “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” book and film, with “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” audio recording.
Comment by Owen Stephens — 29 August 2007 @ 6:52 am[...] FRBR Blog, Library Technology Guides] [...]
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