Category Archives: search limits

Preview the New Look SUNCAT

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Good morning from UKSG 2013! As promised last month the new look SUNCAT is now available for you to preview at http://test.suncat.ac.uk

The current service will continue as the primary service for the moment, but we would encourage you to take a look, experiment and let us have your feedback on the new service as soon as you get a chance.

The new service is still in development, so there are still issues to be resolved with keeping it up-to-date, searching and relevancy ranking, but to give you a flavour, the new service:

• Integrates information from the website and the actual service more closely, with the search box, a map of our Contributing Libraries and a feed of our latest news all on the homepage

• Enables searching limited to a specific library or selection of libraries: you will only see the serials’ holdings of libraries you have specified in your search

• Enables searching limited to a specific location or selection of locations, all the way from Inverness to Exeter: again you will only see the serials’ holdings in locations you have specified in your search.

• Plus you can combine library and location limits to suit your individual search requirements

• Enables searching limited to electronic or print serials only: helpful if you only want to see what might be immediately available online or conversely if want to see only material likely to be available via Inter-Library Loan.

• Enables filtering of search results by library, location, subject, organisation, publisher, date etc.

• Enables more sophisticated searching via the Advanced Search option

• Allows you to choose how many records you want to display on your search results screen

• Provides an alphabetical list of all the libraries holding a particular serial title

• Allows you to quickly see if holdings are print or electronic

• Opens up further information about each library, including directions, contact details, British Library code and when it was last updated in SUNCAT

If you are attending UKSG, please come along to the EDINA stand 26 and we will be happy to demo the service for you and answer your questions in person. However, you can also let us know what you think or if you have any questions or suggestions via the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk

We hope you like what you see!

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

SUNCAT Redevelopment: Focus on Limiting your Search by Institution or Location

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This is the first in a series of blog posts which will highlight some of the new or improved features which will be available in the redeveloped SUNCAT. In this post we are going to focus on how the institutional and geographic limits will improve with the new service in comparison to the current service.

Old SUNCAT: You can only select one institution and/or one location per search.

New SUNCAT: Select as many institutions/locations as you like per search. Also, in the future, we hope to allow you to select and save your preferred group of institutions as your default search preference. We would also hope to set up some pre-selected groupings based on institutional consortia or geographic area. For example these might include UK Research Reserve (UKRR), Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL) or Wales, North West England etc.

Old SUNCAT: Only one location (normally the main library) is recorded for each institution on the service, so the geographical location limit is, therefore, not always exact.

New SUNCAT: The new service records all of our contributing institutions’ physical libraries so limiting by location is now much more granular and precise.

Old SUNCAT: You can’t select an institution if it’s outside a location limit you have also selected. For example if you choose to limit your search to the location of “Edinburgh” you cannot then, in addition, select and search on an institution outside Edinburgh, e.g. the University of Glasgow

New SUNCAT: You can combine your limits to create very specific searches tailored for your individual requirements. For example, you can create a search limited to the location of “London” but then also include individual institutions outside London, e.g. University of Oxford.

Old SUNCAT: Although a search with limits applied does only return titles held by that institution or within that location, holdings from other institutions/locations outside of the selected limits will also be displayed.

New SUNCAT: Only holdings within the institutions or locations selected will be returned and displayed, creating a clearer more focussed result and record display.

Naturally, the improved recording of institutions’ individual library locations and the improved functionality of the limits are both vital for the new SUNCAT mobile app which will also be released later this year.

If you have any questions or suggestions about how the limits will work on the new SUNCAT or on the development in general, please contact us at edina@ed.ac.uk.

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

Redevelopment of SUNCAT Platform

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EDINA has embarked on a programme to redevelop the existing SUNCAT search platform. The impetus for this redevelopment emerged from a long held desire to not only provide enhanced functionality but also to be able to be more responsive to user feedback regarding suggested improvements.

Work commenced on the first phase of this development in spring 2012 as EDINA developers started to design and implement an entirely new bespoke user interface for the SUNCAT service.

In this initial development phase SUNCAT will continue to rely on Ex Libris’ Aleph software to load and de-duplicate contributing libraries’ serials records. The web interface however, will be developed in-house leveraging the open source enterprise search platform, Solr to facilitate highly efficient searching across the millions of SUNCAT records.

The developers considered a number of options to facilitate record searching, but Solr proved to be the best solution for dealing with the complex issues around searching and displaying records grouped into matched sets, a central component of the SUNCAT service. Moving to this open source platform should allow EDINA to have greater control and flexibility over the functionality and presentation of SUNCAT.

One key area of improvement, which will be available from the outset, is the ability to limit search results restricted to holdings from multiple libraries and locations. These limits will include all the individual locations of each of our contributing libraries, rather than just locations at an institutional level as with the current service. Another benefit will be that users will be able to select multiple locations and/or institutions to limit their search by, so giving them great flexibility. The limits will now also ensure that users only see the holdings from locations or institutions they are interested in, as any extraneous holdings will no longer be displayed. These improvements mean that in the future EDINA will be able to provide customised views onto the service, configurable at both the individual user level, and also at a higher geographic, subject specialist or consortial level.

The improvements to the geographic limits are particularly important for the mobile application which is also currently in development. EDINA conducted some early user testing with a small group of volunteers earlier in the year and it is hoped that a beta version will be made more widely available early in 2013.

Other key areas of new functionality will follow throughout the next year. The SUNCAT team have identified a wish list of features based on user feedback and also on a survey of some of the best functionality available in commercial search engines, library and union catalogues in the UK, Europe and beyond.

The feedback and survey also informed the design brief for the redeveloped service. Having considered a number of designs the SUNCAT team have narrowed the selection down to a few favoured options and we are currently consulting with our contributing libraries to decide on the final design.

It is hoped that a beta version of the new platform will be available in spring 2013, when we will be asking our users to provide feedback on progress. We hope that you will approve of the changes to come!

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com