Re: Turn off hyperlinked call nos.

[Claudia Chester <cchester@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I hesitated to reply before. But if it means losing the ability to do a
call number search, I would strongly advise against what Iowa City did,
especially since you're an academic, not a public library. After all, isn't
that what BI is for, to show students how to use the catalog (among other
things)?

Our experience is that while occasionally our users are confused by the
call number link, they are much more likely to copy down call numbers ONLY
(no title or author) from the 'extended display' list, and then need to
search them up again if the item is located at some other location than
than the stacks, such as reference or reserves. I think your reference
librarians would be more frustrated if they had to keep using the staff
mode to chase these down for people.

IMHO, the real problem is that the extended display should be capable (as
an option) of displaying the full location (call number, bib loc, item loc)
of each item. Then we wouldn't have either of these problems, although
folks would probably never look at the bib record :-)

Anyway, our experience is that most folks figure it out after awhile. When
we first came up on the Web OPAC after converting to another rather hideous
text-based system which shall remain nameless, the user response was
overwhelmingly positive. And most of our users are not that technologically
savvy (some had never used a mouse before)

This was one of the issues we struggled with when selecting III, but
decided the overall quality of the software was worth it


At 03:51 PM 9/13/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>I've been thinking this over trying to dredge up two year old memories of
our decision-making process before implementation and talking to the one
other person who is here today and was involved. I'm pretty sure Innovative
set it up so that our (item-based) call numbers were not hot. This may not
really work for you though, as we've gone through some rather convoluted
hoops and made some compromises to get things the way we have them. In the
first place, our bib. level call numbers are indexed, but not our item
level call numbers. So a call number search only retrieves records by the
bib. call number - bib. records for items with a different call number
won't be retrieved if searched by their own call number. This is why, when
you "Show items nearby on shelf" in our character- based catalog, you would
not be offered the option of different call numbers as you are in your
catalog - you'd be taken directly to the bib. call number. (If you want to
see one of the "worst" examples of this in our catalog try books by Brian
Jacques, most of which are in both YA and jFiction, but seldom appear in a
jFiction/Jacques search)  Our call number searches are occasionally a bit
misleading, but aren't used by the public much anyway and we felt it was
important to confuse our users as little as possible and be able to
maintain our current method of classifying materials. There may be better
ways to accomplish this, but it was the best we could figure out at the
time. Having to shoe-horn our classifying practices into III's package
sometimes made for difficult decision-making. 
>
>Craig Johnson
>Iowa City Public Library
>(web or telnet to catalog - alec.iowa-city.lib.ia.us)
> 
>>>> Helen Dungan <dunganh@xxxxxxxxxx> 09/13/00 12:56PM >>>
>Craig,
>Thank you -- I've looked in your catalog and would like to know how you
>accomplished this.
> When we have multiple copies of an item in different call numbers, we also
>use the call number field in the item record.  On our web pac these are all
>hotlinked; in a record with multiple call numbers in the character pac,
>when you choose to look at nearby items, the system lists the attached call
>numbers.
>What you've got is what we want; so now I call III because it looks like
>this can be done.
>Thank you again
>Helen
>
>
>--
>This message was distributed through the Innovative Users Group INNOPAC list.
>Private replies:  "Craig Johnson" <CJOHNSON@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Public replies:   INNOPAC@xxxxxxxxxx
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>
*****************************************************************
Claudia Chester				E-mail: cchester@xxxxxxxxxx 
Technical Services Librarian		Phone:  925.258.2362
Fisher Library				FAX:    925.254.8136
John F. Kennedy University
12 Altarinda Rd.			Nothing is simple. It 
Orinda CA 94563				takes time and work.
					- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
*****************************************************************

--
This message was distributed through the Innovative Users Group INNOPAC list.
Private replies:  Claudia Chester <cchester@xxxxxxxxxx>
Public replies:   INNOPAC@xxxxxxxxxx
Archives:  http://innopacusers.org/list/archives/