Ability to edit the OTB (Out-of-the-Box) search and facet rules in Primo VE
We would like to be able to edit the OTB search and facet rules. This is necessary for parity with PBO. There are several things that we were able to do in PBO that we cannot reproduce in VE because of the lack of this functionality. In the PBO OTB author search and facet, we were able to include dates and qualifiers from names in the LCNAF, which improved precision. In the OTB language facet, we were able to include intertitle, caption and audio description languages, which are not currently included in the VE OTB index. On the other hand, we excluded languages of accompanying material, which are currently included in the VE OTB language index. We were able to limit the OTB subject facet to specific vocabularies, such as LCSH. This improved the usefulness of the subject facet because it removed near duplicates and non-English headings. This meant that users got a more helpful variety of terms within the top twenty facets. For subjects, ideally we would be able to do different things with the OTB search index and the OTB facet index, as was possible in PBO. In PBO, we included a larger number of vocabularies in the search index than we did in the facet index.
Blake Galbreath
shared this idea
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Cindy Bowen
commented
NERS 9000, open for voting now.
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Christopher Schiff
commented
We are having similar difficulties with near match names. The system is symply not allowing for exactness. And we should not have to come up with work-arounds to make it more exact.
E.g.: an Author/Creator contains exact phrase "Coleridge, Samuel" to our understanding should only pull up the poet: Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and NOT material by the composer "Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel", but it does. This renders the Name Authority essentially useless. Perhaps we don't understand what "contains exact phrase" means in VE. Is it a proximity search that is weighted toward exact, or is it simply another filtered keyword search? It certainly does not appear to be a string search, as one might be led to believe.
I appreciate Cindy Bowen's comment on Henry VIII - an ideal example. The new system should be making searches like this easier, and it is instead introducing chaos.
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Manu Schwendener commented
> We were able to limit the OTB subject facet to specific vocabularies, such as LCSH.
We are struggling with this, too.
If this gets through, the choice of the authority file must be flexible, for us it would be the German GND, for example.
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Cindy Bowen
commented
The shortcomings of the OTB search rules are especially obvious and have a dire impact on search usefulness now that the 'Equals Exact Phrase' search operator has been introduced. For example, properly qualified LC Name Authority headings are impossible to search using the new operator because the OTB indexing uses only subfield $a for Author/Creator fields. For our cataloged titles, this has the ludicrous result of effectively only searching "Henry" from the name heading of King Henry VIII of England: $a Henry $b VIII, $c King of England, $d 1491-1547. If you search the full heading, the only results you receive are from the CDI, which misrepresents available resources.
We are able to adjust search functionality for our hypertext linking definitions because of the ability to edit field normalization for that purpose, but there is currently no way to affect the OTB search more broadly. We need to be able to edit the OTB search rules to support local needs and allow our search results to better match user expectations.