[Benjamin Kalish]

I agree that Evergreen could do more to make this user friendly!

[Benjamin Kalish]

This would be great!

It would also be good to have permalinks for searches–when a search has just one result it redirects to the bib record, making linking to the original search more difficult than one would like.

[Benjamin Kalish]

I agree that it would be nice for these to be configurable, but it isn’t clear to me at what level the changes should be made. At the consortium level? At some lower level so that they could be changed for just one library or library group? Or maybe it should be customizable per workstation, per login, or per permission group.

[Benjamin Kalish]

This does seem useful!

[Benjamin Kalish]

Yes, it’s not an easy problem! Perhaps an approach like follows might make sense:

• Create new fields (to store these values)
• For all existing records, and for each new record, as it is entered, do some text analysis to populate the extent fields whenever the physical description fits one of a number of predictable patterns
• allow library staff to update these fields in case the automatic procedure can’t identify the extent or gets it wrong

I think that automatic procedure could be made to get it right in a lot of cases. And I am certainly fine with the information being missing from some records. Having it on most records would be more than worth it.

[Benjamin Kalish]

I imagine this as a (possibly repeatable) line on the advanced search page.

Here’s a mockup (without it being repeatable, for simplicity):

The first drop down has options of “Is”, “Less than”, “Greater than” and “Between” while the second drop down has options of “Pages”, “Minutes”, and “Inches”.

[Benjamin Kalish]

That would be very helpful!

[Benjamin Kalish]

I was looking at CW MARS’s training server which currently is our preview of 3.7 and I saw that the call number browse now appears embedded in each record in a section called “Shelf Browser”. This makes improvements to this interface all the more important. Before most of our users never saw these screens, but with that change we can expect its use to increase dramatically (and we can expect folks to be confused by the fact that the shelf browser does not take shelving location into account.)

[Benjamin Kalish]

It definitely sounds like a fix for this is overdue!

I can imagine many different solutions to this and I can imagine that the approach taken could make a big difference in the ease of implementation–we might want to ask some devs their opinion on the easiest way of avoiding the problem before requesting a specific change. (On the ticket there is some talk about doing a check at login, which would, I imagine, be very easy.)

[Benjamin Kalish]

We have SmartyStreets verification in our giving database (littlegreenlight.com) and I love it. It is important to note, however, that it isn’t always able to find a match and we do occasionally have addresses that it can’t verify or where we have to correct unit number that SmartyStreet gets wrong. Our giving database handles this by:

1. providing a verify button – pressing verify replaces the entered address with the verified address
2. replacing the verify button with an undo button after verification, making it easy to undo the damage if the process goes wrong
3. letting you edit the verified address after verification, in case a small adjustment in necessary

[Benjamin Kalish]

+1. I have no experience with this part of Evergreen, but moving these into the database and providing an Evergreen interface for them seems like a no-brainer.

[Benjamin Kalish]

If I understand the tags correctly, it looks like we will see Bug #1891550 implemented in the next release.

[Benjamin Kalish]

Excellent. I told Launchpad it “affects me too”.

[Benjamin Kalish]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1745623 is interesting, but definitely not the same as the idea proposed here.

Another related bug on Launchpad is https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/1878660, but again its not the same.

As far as I can tell there is not yet a Launchpad bug for the behavior described here. Does anyone seen one I missed?

[Benjamin Kalish]

It looks like there is a different new bug: I got results for my search scoped to Niagara Fall Public Library, but no results for any of its branches.

Perhaps related: whenever I tried to view the MARC Record I got a Internal Server Error.

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