Databases have always been listed in SearchWorks; now they're easier to find and browse.

There's a new Format called "Database A-Z". When you select this format, you get a list of databases sorted by title, and the specially-assigned database subjects are highlighted at the top of the left column. (You can also click the "find the best database(s)" link below the search box on the home page.)

Whenever a database is included in search results, it is highlighted by a green stripe, and the URL is labelled "Search inside". The detailed record view for each database includes links to other databases on the same subject, and to information pages about off-campus access and reporting connection issues.

This update also includes some bug fixes, and a small enhancement: the Online section in the detailed record view now has a green header instead of the grey/brown one, to help highlight that online resources are always "Available" even when At the Library copies may not be.

SearchWorks has supported searching for some call numbers for a while now; we've now enhanced this feature to give more accurate searching for LC, Dewey, and Media/Microtext call numbers. To do this, we've had to remove call numbers from the "everything" search, and have added a specific "Call number" search option to the Search pull-down.

To specify when you're searching by call number:

1. Enter the call number in the search box (no quotes required)
2. Click the arrow next to Search, and select "Call Number"

We will continue to work on integrating call number search into the "Everything" search, as well as the standard numbers field in Advanced Search.

Subject links and subject searches previously allowed terms to be found across multiple subject headings. For example, clicking on this subject link:

• Vocal music > Thematic catalogs.

would also find records with these separate headings:

• Haydn, Joseph, 1732-1809 > Thematic catalogs.
• Vocal music.

Now subject links (and a quoted subject phrase searches) will find the terms in order within in the same heading.

Several SearchWorks improvements were released today.

Better popups: Now you can move the Feedback form around by dragging its header, and copy/paste text from your search page into the form. The new popups are also used for Cite This, SMS/Text, and Librarian View.

Ctrl-click/Cmd-click: In some browser/OS combinations, the Ctrl-click or Cmd-click shortcut for opening links in a new tab was not working for titles in the search results list. This has been fixed.

More accurate locations in search results: Items that are temporarily located away from their 'home' location now display their current location in the search results list, so you don't have to click through to the detail page to find the item. The affected temporary locations are: the HAS and SSRC New Books areas, the IC Display Shelf, Reserves, and the Loan Desk.

Performance: You may have noticed intermittent performance and stability problems in SearchWorks over the past few weeks. We have made a number of changes to improve performance and prevent these issues in the future.

RSS/Atom feeds have been enabled for auto-discovery on search result pages (see the blue icon in the browser location box). Enabling these protocols allows feed readers and other external applications to query SearchWorks and receive results in a standard XML format, and lays the groundwork for providing topical new book feeds.

RefWorks exports: certain diacritics would not export cleanly from SearchWorks; these have now been fixed.

Many of these enhancements came from community contributions to the open source Blacklight project, the application behind SearchWorks. This is an excellent example of coding locally and benefiting globally.

A recurring question we get from the feedback form is why clicking on a link in SearchWorks does not automatically open in a new tab or window. Many users are used to links that leave the current website by opening in new windows; but in fact the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommend against it.

When you force a link to open in a new tab or window, you remove the user's ability to choose the action that they desire. There is no facility for the user to override a link's default behavior if it is set to open in a new tab or window. As it is in SearchWorks now, the user always has a choice whether to open the link in the same window or a new one.

There are a couple ways to control where a link opens. To open a link in a new tab, simply ctrl-click (on Windows) or cmd-click (on Macs) on the link. To open a link in a new window, right-click on the link to pull up the right-click menu (the context menu) and select "Open in new window."

Allowing the user to choose the action of the link is a best practice in web design and not doing so can pose some accessibility issues. There are many different ways a user can be affected by randomly opened windows. For people using screen readers, it is difficult to navigate once the new window or tab is opened. You can find more examples at the Stanford Online Accessibility Programs' website. As with all SULAIR web sites and applications, SearchWorks is designed to accommodate all users. SearchWorks follows best practices for web user interfaces and adheres to the ethical obligations of libraries to provide access to all users.

We have improved the display of item availability information. On the resource detail page, items are grouped by library and home location. Within each group, call numbers are sorted according to their type - serials in reverse chronological order; mutli-volume sets in ascending volume order; boxes/folders in ascending numerical order, and so on. Multiple copies of the same item are now shown individually.

If an item has a current location that's different from its home location, the current location is displayed on a second line after the call number, along with a due date, if one exists. If a hold/recall or other request is allowed for an item, a [request] link will be present. (For now, this link goes to the Socrates record; we're working hard on request forms and will include them in a later release.)

If there is a public note attached to an item (e.g. "Volume also contains..."), it is displayed on a line following the call number.

Special instructions or links can be added for a library and/or location. For example:

• SAL, SAL3, SAL Newark locations all have a "Page for delivery" link
• Special Collections, Hoover Archives have a "Request at service desk" instruction
• Lane and Jackson items have a link to the record in their respective catalogs

Status icons show more refined states - and a tooltip appears when the mouse hovers over an icon:

• available for checkout
• available for in-library use (non-circulating items)
• must be requested or paged (SALs, Special Collections, Hoover Archive, any -30 location)
  • if there's an online request form, a request link will be present
• currently checked out, or otherwise unavailable (in process, out for repair, etc.)
  • if holds/recalls are allowed for the item, a request link will be present
• current status unknown
  • this may be because the live status lookup hasn't completed, or has timed out
  • on the search results page, if there are multiple copies/volumes for a library/location with mixed circulation statuses, the overall status will appear as unknown
  • Items in Lane or Jackson have unknown status (as well as a link to the same item in their respective catalogs)

On the search results page, the goal is to display a summary line for each library/location that holds the item, with a summary status for the volumes/copies at that location (e.g. all available, all checked out, or a combination - so the user must go to the item detail view for more information). We've made some big improvements in collapsing multiple items into one library/location summary line, but the work is not yet complete and some items (for example, DVDs) list all the volumes/copies, with each line showing the summary status for the group.

SearchWorks includes the same resources as Socrates, but is slightly less current - usually within the range of a day to a week. Some on-order items may be visible in Socrates but not in SearchWorks, depending on their stage of processing. The circulation status shown in SearchWorks is current, based on a live lookup to the circulation system. We are working on increasing the frequency of updates and bringing in all on-order resources.

SearchWorks now has an advanced search feature, along with some other enhancements and corrections.

Now you can do multi-argument searching across multiple fields - for example, to find specific author/title combinations in multiple formats. Click the 'Advanced' link next to the search button, or go there directly at http://searchworks.stanford.edu/advanced. Click the question mark at the end of each field for more info about what is searched in that field. Note that advanced search does not currently support phrase searching (words in quotes), but phrase searching can be done in the simple search box.

Other changes:

• On the home page, the cursor is automatically placed in the search box.
• When a search finds no results, the page now offers search tips and links to retry the search in Worldcat or Google Books.
• We have added "hover" text to the subject heading links to show explicitly what will be searched when you click on each segment of the subject heading.
• We've replaced the raw MARC XML view with a standard MARC "Librarian view." The link is still in the bottom right corner of the item detail view.
• Books with multiple copies now list all copies individually.
• Subject keywords in 653$a are no longer concatenated.
• Several small changes, additions, and corrections to improve the display of MARC data in the item detail view.

Though not fully resolved, we have also made some progress in addressing performance issues. Specifically, Open Search and the live availability lookup are now faster; other performance tuning has resulted in fewer error pages. We are working hard with networking and other resources to identify and resolve these problems.

The Google Books Preview button was not appearing in Internet Explorer (for books that have previews). This issue has been resolved.

We've made scores of changes to SearchWorks based on your reports and requests during the past two weeks. The most visible ones include: 

• The search box has been made longer.
• The Search Subjects option is available again.
• The search selections breadcrumb appears on the item detail page as well as on the search results page.
• Search results can be sorted by date from new to old, or from old to new.
• Links to full text and related e-resources on the item detail page are displayed with their correct descriptions and notes. (Full-text links on the search results page still show only the URL; this will be addressed in a later update.)
• We are no longer displaying the complete container list in the search results for Special Collections materials.
• Many (!) MARC tags for local subject, provenance, and serials continuation links have been added, relocated, and/or relabeled according to requests.

We'll continue to address issues and make enhancements over the coming weeks, in addition to turning our development efforts to introducing better browsing to the new application.

We've done a lot of work here in response to feedback from the Stanford community and usability testing conducted here and at University of Virginia.

• The complete bibliographic record is displayed in one page, no longer broken up into tabs. This means that all the information the searcher needs to make a decision about the current item is displayed on one page—no additional clicks required.
• The columnar display accommodates very long holding records and very long MARC records while maintaining consistent locations for key information.
  • Subject headings are pulled out into the left column, to highlight their use in finding related materials.
  • Availability information is displayed more concisely and organized in a way that will allow us to refine the display and behavior by location.
• The "Google Preview" button opens the viewer in a lightbox on top of the detail page.

We will continue to test and refine this display based on usability testing and feedback.

Two features had a negative usability impact and reduced user confidence in the search results:

• the ability to search keywords "in Subject";
• the "similar items" sidebar on the item detail page.

We will continue to look for a more effective way to provide this functionality.

The "Librarian View" of the MARC record has been replaced by a link to the XML view of the record for now. The XML layout will be replaced by a more readable display.

SearchWorks development has been quiet on the surface for the last few months, but quite active behind the scenes. We’ve spent the last two quarters doing a technology switch "under the hood." Specifically, we replaced the VuFind engine (http://www.vufind.org/) that powered the first iteration of SearchWorks with Blacklight (http://blacklightopac.org/). Both are open-source projects with similar faceted-search features, but Blacklight has some clear advantages for Stanford, including better maintainability and a common technology platform for future digital library applications.

Blacklight provides:

• support for non-MARC records, so you can search and display materials not currently handled in Socrates, such as images, geographic data, and EADs;
• different views by domain or by discipline (e.g. Music, Earth Sciences);
• specific displays and behaviors by content type;
• some immediate benefits that greatly improve usability, such as improved facet performance and better "did you mean?" suggestions.

Perhaps most importantly, Stanford University is a full partner in Blacklight's ongoing development, which means we can both influence the future direction of the project and more easily take advantage of enhancements added by other partners.

SearchWorks now allows you to sort your search results by year of publication. There are more changes coming soon, but sort-by-date has been such a frequently-requested feature that we wanted to make it available immediately. Let us know what you think; and stay tuned...

More people are using SearchWorks now, and we're getting some very useful feedback. Thanks, and keep it coming!

• Is there a way to mark and mail/text a series of results? I can see how you can do the whole search or individual records but not a selected number.
• It's important to have the ability to select individual records from a search result and then be able to print, mail, etc. the selected list, not just item by item.
• Texts should include the call number. I would text myself the information so I could find it in the stacks, but just having the name is more or less usless--I might as well use paper if I have to use a piece of paper to write down the call number anyway. [Note: Texts do include the call number, but on some phones that portion of the message is truncated. We'll find a way around this.]
• It will be important to have a BROWSE function in searchworks, as relevance is a nice feature but doesn't always work well with common titles, like zeitschrift, etc.
• The NEARBY ITEMS ON SHELF feature is one of the most important to Stanford researchers using Socrates. This is especially important when they are looking for just the right volume to page from SAL-3.
• It would be useful to have a request page link for items at SAL and SAL3 right under the access tab instead of having to use findit@stanford...requires two extra clicks.
• Thank you! I haven't had time to play around too much, but it is MUCH IMPROVED from the former jenson.stanford.edu search. Thank you!
• The faceted searching is nice but if I want to limit my results via my search query, I cannot because there is no "advanced" search like with Socrates. It is not explicit if I can use the search box to search for only items in a particular library; I will have to enter my search term and then wait for the results to appear before being able to refine the search by clicking on the links that appear to the left of the results.
• It should be possible to request the next item in the results list without needing to go back to the results list.

We've had multiple requests for the ability to sort results by publication date! (And we will add it.)

• Great product. Will there be the option to filter or sort results according to publication date?
• Are there plans to be able to sort results by publication year?
• We must have date added to the sorting. Hugely important.
• It would be helpful to sort by date. I'm looking for old travel books on Africa.
• Please enable sort by publish date in the results field.
• I would like to sort search results by several other fields including year, location, status, call number and format.

Some recent feedback from a PWR class, summarized by a librarian:

• Unanimous preference for look and feel of Searchworks over Socrates
• Loved the ability to limit search results by facets – especially for Video
• Loved the Cite This feature
• Liked the Text Citation feature
• Like book covers because it helps them find book on shelf
• Like Relevance sorting, want Publication Date sorting
• Liked Preview this feature
• Liked easy link to e-books

And other comments we've received via the Feedback option:

• This is the search engine we wish we had in grad school.
• Could you indicate what "relevance" means in terms of sorting?
• All in all, SearchWorks is a much more sophisticated search and viewer for bibliographic data than the Socrates.
• Would be nice to be able to browse new items added in the last day, last week, last month.
• It is very fast and very nicely organized. I really like the refine panel on the left to further limit searches to specific Topics, Formats, Authors etc. It lets me know all the of possible subtopics in a context specific way which is very helpful to someone searching a corpus in which they are not an expert.
• I would like to save or download multiple selected search results, not just one at a time.
  
• I would like to be able to output search results in a variety of formats - the email just giving the search URL is not sufficient.
• The Did you mean suggestions seem dumb sometimes...
• Hebrew and Arabic fields in SearchWorks are left-aligned, and the punctuation for these fields it not all handled correctly.
• Searching in vernacular scripts in SearchWorks brings up different results than in Socrates.
• I recommend that you include faculty advisor in author search results for theses and dissertations.
• Will there eventually be a way to request off-campus items?
• Where is the Advanced Search feature? If there isn't one, why not?

We're happy to report some progress on searching and display of vernacular (HA & CJK) scripts! SearchWorks now displays vernacular title, author, and publisher information in the search results and record view pages. In the record view, only the fields that display "above the tabs" are currently shown in vernacular - the remaining vernacular fields in the MARC record will be added soon to the Details and Subject tabs. You can search by vernacular scripts in the "everything" search; they have not yet been enabled for the specific field searches. Please send us your feedback on any issues you discover.

Some additional changes & corrections:

1. ISSN searches have been enabled.
2. A correction has been made to searches in the Author field, so that names are no longer "stemmed" like regular vocabulary.
3. Sorting search results by author has been improved, and now interfiles Meeting and Corporate authors with personal names.
4. Bug fix: For searches where the default search was not by relevance, selecting the relevance sort was causing an error - this has been corrected.

Google's new book viewer is now in SearchWorks! You'll see a new tab (labeled "Full Text" or "Preview") in the record view for any books to which Google provides access. Click the tab to view the content. Here are a couple of sample records:

• Full Text of The turtles of Tasman
• Preview of Marilyn Horne : the song continues

These small changes have also been made:

• Corporate (110) and Meeting (111) authors have been added to the results list.
• The date sort option on the results list has been removed temporarily, as it was giving incorrect results. It will be restored as soon as the underlying issue is resolved.

SearchWorks has recently been updated with the following changes:

• Bug fixed: Removing certain facets from a search caused an error.
• Bug fixed: A search containing a semi-colon caused an error.
• Bug fixed: Book citations are now saved as books in Zotero, not as web pages.
• Search results for facets selected from the home page (with no search term entered) are now sorted by title.
• Sorting search results by author now also sorts each author's works by title.

We've also included some changes to the treatment of online resource links, in response to discussions in yesterday's RISC meeting:

• In the results list: If there is more than one "online access" link for a resource, we provide the first link (so the user can click directly from the results view) and indicate how many additional links are available in the record view.
• In the record view: for each online resource, we display the link text provided in the MARC record plus the host portion of the URL - e.g. "Sciences (Access restricted to Stanford community) via search.ebscohost.com" - to help users distinguish when multiple vendors provide access to the same content.
• All links to online resources, including SFX, now open in a new browser window.

Please send us feedback and let us know what you think of these changes.

We've made some major improvements to the system performance in finding the results, loading the facets, and displaying book covers! We'll continue to work on improving the display of location and current status information in the search results.

The Call Number facets now include only Stanford-assigned call numbers. Library of Congress and Dewey numbers have been separated into two lists - let us know what you think about this.

Sort by Title has been added to the sort options on the search results page.

Every record now has a direct link to the same record in Socrates. You can find the link in the Access tab on the item page.

The Access facet options have been changed to "At the library" and "Online".

Much more information now is displayed on the item page, in the Details tab. (We're still working to get all the right information displayed in the right places.)

Latest update of items from Socrates/Unicorn was September 08, 2008. Status information is current via live lookup.