RE: Web OPAC searching questions

["Ericsson, Paul" <PEricsson at onconcord dot com>]

Lisa -

Its funny - for the past year, I found myself beginning all of my postings to the list with the same caveat that you used -- "we are a new site..."    Everyone on the list have been wonderfully gracious with answering our questions. Don't feel that you need to apologize for your questions, and if you have given a good faith effort to researching CSdirect and the list archives, chances are that your question is unique, or at least has a unique twist to it.

Your questions:

1) We did not offer to librarians the text catalog - frankly it was not really mentioned as an option by III during our training and setup. Now that we are up and running, my experience is that our ref staff do use Millenium at some times (we are small enough that we were able to purchase extra Millenium clients for ref desks) and web OPAC at other times, depending upon what task they are doing (holds, verification, reference....). I have been wondering about using the text catalog in conjunction with a screen reader software to provide an adaptive solution. Researching that question and experimenting with solutions is on the long "to do list".  Having said that - I am curious about the text catalog AirPAC that you are offering. Have you experimented with using this in conjunction with screen reader software for users with adaptive requirements?

2) I was not able to get the links to your site to open (the email text wrap chopped-up the links), so I could not replicate your experience from your questions. When I did a keyword search for drugs, all of the entries that I browsed seemed to be appropriate responses. In a general way, our experience since migrating last December, is that we did have some tweaking to do with the OPAC options after we got up and running. And to be honest with you, because of a raft of internal workload issues, we still have quite a bit of work to do with our opac. But I have found that there clearly was going to be a reorientation by our staff and our public. Only a few of the diehard "mouse challenged" patrons still comment that they liked our old Galaxy system text-based catalog better.

By the way - may I say that I think your OPAC looks great. I am going to use your site as an example to our staff of a well done OPAC. We are upgrading to Silver soon, and then are going to settle down for really fine tuning our OPAC.

Best wishes with your migration.

Paul
	___________________________________________

	Paul Ericsson
	Adult Services Supervisor / Automation Coordinator
	Concord Public Library    http://www.onconcord.com
	45 Green St.     Concord, NH 03301     603 230-3697
	pericsson at onconcord dot com
	___________________________________________
		

 

-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org
[mailto:innopac-bounces at innopacusers dot org]On Behalf Of Lisa Hill
Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2004 5:56 PM
To: innopac at innopacusers dot org
Subject: Web OPAC searching questions


Hi-
We are a *very* new innovative site- we went live form Dynix to III on
10/14.
I have a few questions- I apologize in advance if they seem very simple-
I did check the archives- but I may not have been using the right search
terms....

1) How many of you have your reference librarians using the Web opac and
not the text based catalog? We were told that they were "sunsetting" the
text based version so we did not buy it. However, I am getting an awful
lot of complaints from the librarians- it seems as though they could
perform more advanced searching in Dynix text based catalog- is that
true with III text based catalog?

2) Dynix had something called a "word list" so when you typed in a word
like "drugss" it would give a you a list like Words: DRUGSTORE
<http://ipac2.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1098H68F17D63.45&profile=
dial--1--1--1&uri=search=ALL at !DRUGSTORE&aspect=basic_search&menu=search&
ri=1&source=198 dot 104 dot 63 dot 131 at !dial--1--1--1&term=DRUGSTORE&index=ALL>
DRUGSTORES
<http://ipac2.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1098H68F17D63.45&profile=
dial--1--1--1&uri=search=ALL at !DRUGSTORES&aspect=basic_search&menu=search
&ri=1&source=198 dot 104 dot 63 dot 131 at !dial--1--1--1&term=DRUGSTORES&index=ALL>
DRUGTIME
<http://ipac2.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1098H68F17D63.45&profile=
dial--1--1--1&uri=search=ALL at !DRUGTIME&aspect=basic_search&menu=search&r
i=1&source=198 dot 104 dot 63 dot 131 at !dial--1--1--1&term=DRUGTIME&index=ALL>
DRUGTREATMENT
<http://ipac2.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1098H68F17D63.45&profile=
dial--1--1--1&uri=search=ALL at !DRUGTREATMENT&aspect=basic_search&menu=sea
rch&ri=1&source=198 dot 104 dot 63 dot 131 at !dial--1--1--1&term=DRUGTREATMENT&index=A
LL>  DRUGU
<http://ipac2.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1098H68F17D63.45&profile=
dial--1--1--1&uri=search=ALL at !DRUGU&aspect=basic_search&menu=search&ri=1
&source=198 dot 104 dot 63 dot 131 at !dial--1--1--1&term=DRUGU&index=ALL>  DRUGZ
<http://ipac2.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1098H68F17D63.45&profile=
dial--1--1--1&uri=search=ALL at !DRUGZ&aspect=basic_search&menu=search&ri=1
&source=198 dot 104 dot 63 dot 131 at !dial--1--1--1&term=DRUGZ&index=ALL>  DRUHA
<http://ipac2.kcls.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=1098H68F17D63.45&profile=
dial--1--1--1&uri=search=ALL at !DRUHA&aspect=basic_search&menu=search&ri=1
&source=198 dot 104 dot 63 dot 131 at !dial--1--1--1&term=DRUHA&index=ALL> - is there
anything like that in III?
Thank you for your time, again I apologize if this is was in the
archives.
Lisa Hill
Web Services Librarian
www.kcls.org




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