Re: [IUG] Spell-check in the opac

[Michelle Watson <michelle dot watson at deakin dot edu dot au>]

Hi Gail,

We have had Spellcheck in since 2006, and although we don't have any 
specific data, we strongly suspect it's helping our users, especially 
our ESL students (we have a fairly large proportion of those at one 
of our campuses), and bad typists.  From memory we have a number of 
dictionaries installed, in a certain order, with British English 
listed at the top.

Literature says that you should offer alternative actions for failed 
searches, so spell check is really useful if the failed search has 
arisen because of bad spelling or poor typing.  Only works on Keyword 
searching however (an X search; from my experience it doesn't work on 
Y searches).

Having said that, there is an 'annoyance' factor; e.g. when I type in 
'deakin university' spell check asks: "Do you mean dealing 
university'?  And if I type in 'conservation and biodiversity' it 
asks "did you mean 'conservation and bloodiest?"  We noticed this 
when we first installed it ... so it's probably time I re-visited the 
issue!  There was also talk a while ago of adding site specific 
information to spell checker's lexicon. Not sure if anything has come 
of that ... does anyone know if this can/has been done?

Cheers,
Michelle.

At 11:17 AM 5/09/2008, you wrote:
> We are considering buying spell-check for our opac. Does your 
> library have spell-check?  Do you think it has helped  improve your 
> patrons' search success?
>
> Thank you!
>
> Gail Bonath
> Grinnell College Libraries
>
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Michelle Watson, Web Cataloguing Librarian, Library
+ Deakin University Geelong Victoria 3217 Australia.
( Phone: 03 5227 8220 International: +61 3 5227 8220
( Fax: 03 5227 8000 International: +61 3 5227 8000
: E-mail: michelle at deakin dot edu dot au
: Website: http://www.deakin.edu.au
Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B (Vic), 02414F (NSW)

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