Cataloging & Search Poppy Features - non ECS

Owned by Christine Schultz-Richert
Last updated: May 10, 2024 by Khalilah Gambrell
4 min read

What’s new in Cataloging and Search

Contacts: Khalilah Gambrell and Christine Schultz-Richert

Inventory Search & Browse

Browse call numbers by call number type (UXPROD-4327 & UXPROD-3569)

Description: Within Inventory Browse, new browse options have been added to browse and sort call numbers by specific types. For this iteration, the following options are available for browsing:

*All call numbers of any type can still be browsed through a new option: “Call numbers (all)”

New call number browse options

Changes/additions:

  • In order to support this implementation, the above call number types are no longer editable in Inventory settings.

Known Limitations:

  • Effective location (item) facet: In this release, if items on a single Instance have call numbers of different call number types, when browsing by a specific type, the locations of all items on that Instance will appear in this facet.

  • Effective location (item) facet: In this release, when call numbers have a type and a custom location, they will not show in call numbers (all) option. Will be addressed in future refactor. 

Actions required:

Migration needed to correct call-number shelving order that is used for call-number browse:

Advanced search modal (UXPROD-4424)

Description: In the Inventory Search & filter pane, a new button was added to open the Advanced search modal. This modal allows you to combine search queries using boolean operators, as well as the following search types:

  • Contains all

  • Exact phrase

  • Starts with

Changes/additions: None

Known limitations:

  • For Instances coded as English, the default behavior is to apply word-stemming in exact phrase searches. Evaluation will occur to determine if this is expected behavior.

Actions required: None

Relevance sorting (UXPROD-4200)

Description: There is a new option to sort Inventory results by relevance. This sorting uses the Okapi BM25 algorithm, which takes into account the following factors:

  • Term Frequency (TF): First, it looks at how often your search words appear in each instance. If an instance has your search words many times, it gets a higher score because it's more likely to be a good match
  • Inverse Document Frequency (IDF): Then, it checks how common or rare your search words are across all the instances in the library. If your words are rare, they get a higher score. If they are common, they get a lower score. This helps give importance to unique words.
  • Document Length (DL): BM25 also considers how long each instance is. If an instance is very long, it might dilute the importance of your search words, so it gets a lower score.
  • Parameter Tuning: BM25 has a few parameters that you can adjust to fine-tune your search. These parameters help you control how much importance you want to give to term frequency, inverse document frequency, and document length.
  • Calculation: Finally, BM25 combines all these factors using a mathematical formula to calculate a score for each instance. The instance with the highest score is considered the best match for your search.

Changes/additions: None

Known limitations: Inability to tune algorithm at this time

Actions required: None

MARC authority

Single record automated linking (UXPROD-3874)

Description: Added the ability to automatically link MARC bibliographic headings to an authority record when the user selects the “Link headings” button in the quickMARC UI of a MARC bibliographic record. This functionality requires the presence of an $0 subfield containing the authority record control number or standard number to match to the authority record heading.

Important considerations:

  • This is not a batch feature and currently only supports single record automated linking

  • No string match support. 

Changes/additions:

Actions required: Enable/disable automated linking via above Entities links API

  • Default rules:

    • Name - Yes

    • Uniform title - Yes

    • Name-Title - Yes

    • Subjects (6xx) - Disabled until subject thesaurus validation is in place

Delete authority record Leader updates (UXPROD-4304)

Description: When a MARC authority record is deleted, the Leader position (record status) 05 is set to “d”.

Changes/additions: None.

Actions required: None.

Failed updates: Linked bibliographic fields report (UXPROD-4053)

Description: There is a new report that contains any fields in a MARC bibliographic record that did not update once the linked heading in the MARC authority record was updated. This report can be accessed via a new “Reports” section in the MARC authority Actions menu, and once run, can be downloaded from Export Manager.


Changes/additions: None.

Actions required: None.

Authority control enhancements (UXPROD-4071)

Description: After receiving feedback on manual authority control in the Orchid release, we addressed the following enhancements:

  • Subfield $9 handling

  • Pre-populating the search/browse box in the find authority record plugin based on the MARC bib field contents

  • General bugfixes

Changes/additions:

Actions required:

quickMARC

Create a new MARC bibliographic record from the UI (UXPROD-3909)

Description: You can now create an original MARC bibliographic record directly from Inventory. For users with the “quickMARC: Create a new MARC bibliographic record” permission, there is a new option in the Inventory Actions menu which will open a blank MARC bibliographic record in quickMARC. Upon saving and closing quickMARC, a new Instance record will be created.

Changes/additions:

  • New permission: quickMARC: Create a new MARC bibliographic record

  • 008 is now a required field

Known limitations: None.

Actions required: None.