AVS without adjacency problem

[Elizabeth Thomsen <et@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We're using AVS searching in the webopac with the option to automatically 
use adjacency turned off.  We like the way this works.  

If you do a search on New England, the system finds all records that have
New and England anywhere in the record, and you can see that your search
was changed by the message "Tried (new and england)".

If you do a search on "New England", the system searches this as a phrase 
anywhere in the record.  

We can use the context specifiers a:, t:, etc., to search a word in a
keyword segment, which works fine for something like this-- 
   a:catton t:gettysburg 
which finds records with Catton as an author and Gettysburg in the title.

But a search on d:new england is (logically) interpreted as a search for 
the word new in a subject heading and england anywhere in the record.

What we want to do, and didn't realize we couldn't do, was to use the 
context specifiers along with quotation marks to search a phrase.  A 
search on d:"new england" should get records with the phrase New England 
in a subject heading, shouldn't it?  Instead, it gets no hits, with no 
message even on what it thought it was searching.

I tried this on one other system that I knew was using keyword with the
adjacency option off, with the same results as on our system.  

Please tell me that I am missing something obvious, or have something set
wrong...I love to be wrong if it means an easy fix to a problem.  I just
don't know how to write to teach people they can specify context or search
a phrase, but not both.

In case you want to try these searches on our catalog, I put the links on
this page:
http://www.noblenet.org/swapshop/webcat/avsproblem.html

-- 
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
Danvers MA 01923
et@xxxxxxxxxx