[Ruth Davis]

Submitted by Ben Kalish
https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1869890

Currently, if you navigate to Numeric Search and perform such a search, you must navigate back to Numeric Search to do further searches of the same type.

It would be much better if the search box on the results page were populated in such a way so that it could be edited to modify the search. This would require to changes:

1. The search box should be populated with a human readable version of the search, e.g. isbn:0545010225 or call_num:PS301 or barcode:A001122334455

2. The search grammar must be updated to recognize searches entered as in #1.

This also would have the advantage of allowing more proficient users to perform their numeric searches from any screen, without having to navigate to the numeric search page in the first place.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by Ruth Davis.

[Ruth Davis]

Legacy reply from Elizabeth Thomsen – I agree that the search shown at the top of the search results page should match the search just performed, with the search type, format and scope all set correctly. But I don’t think the search type information should be in the search box itself, just in the dropdown. If anything other than the search terms end up in that box, it makes it harder for the user to enter a new search term. So rather than look like have this in the search box: identifier|isbn:9780062436634 I think it would be better to just have the dropdown for ISBN and just the isbn in the search box itself.

Putting search types in the search box is a messy habit the catalog has — you see it if you search as keyword and then change the search type to title and then subject, etc., and the search box ends up looking like this: https://bit.ly/messysearch

[Benjamin Kalish]

Responding to Elizabeths reply:

While I think that the mess in your screen shot is absolutely to be avoided—I think that allowing complex searches to be initiated and edited without using the advanced search screen is essential. We do have a problem in the catalog now where search grammar is added to the search box unnecessarily, resulting in redundancy between the grammar and the dropdowns or even in the grammar itself (why do we ever end up with “author:author:author:Smith”?)

In the particular case of an isbn search, it would be great if this displayed with just the isbn in the search box and with ISBN in the dropdown, but we would first have to add ISBN to the dropdown. It’s not currently an option. And we need the more general case for searches like title:sea author:verne.

[Elizabeth Thomsen]

I wasn’t sure if you were referring to the staff or public versions of the catalog, but this works MUCH better in the Angularized version of the staff catalog, also known as the Experimental Staff Catalog. This will be the default staff catalog in Release 3.6.

Here’s a screenshot from Release 3.5.1:

[Elizabeth Thomsen]

Tested this in the new Bootstrap refreshed version of the catalog, and this looks the same as it does in the current version of the public catalog, which makes sense since the refreshed version is about layout and design and doesn’t affect the way search itself works.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 7 months ago by Elizabeth Thomsen.

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