Wishlist of Features and Functions

Wishlist of Features and Functions General Search Access Points Result Lists Individual Records Truly wishful thinking

General

• Ability to expand search beyond the local library (both before and after initial search)
• integration of catalogs & databases
• Inclusion of more than books and journals (i.e. full scope of what the library can point patrons toward)
• easy RSS feeds/email/SMS/whatever notifications
• Modular (should be able to embed search widgets in other pages)
• Save/print/download records, texts, result lists, and citations
• View, save, download my tags/reviews/rated stuff/marked list
• records housed in a database that we (librarians) can actually query/manipulate (i.e. MySQL)
• Include access to help (tutorials and live librarians) in all levels of the interface
• Some way to reduce duplication of the effort of getting stuff into the catalog

Search

• "Did you mean" (based on database match, not just dictionary)
• Basic/Advanced search
• URLs for individual searches
• Failed search results in "What do you want to do?" and presents choices: order via Interlibrary Loan (for title searches), search other libraries (WorldCat), look for a copy to buy (Amazon?).
• Search traditional fields, tags, and full text (when available)
• Search in multiple languages for multiple languages
• Search for original and secondary languages
• Should be able to parse keyword searches to understand what may be titles, subject, names, etc.
• What do we do about boolean?

Access Points

Lots of access points are great, but how do we present them so they're efficient but not overpowering?

• keyword (what should it search?)
• title
• author and other named people
• LCSH
• tag
• format
• genre
• language
• popularity?
• suggested "people who liked this liked that"?
• standard number
• call number (for all the times students only bring that to the desk)
• Titles of essays/stories/poems in books
• Authors of essays/stories/poems in books
• Entries in the indices of books
• Entries in the bibliographies of items

Result Lists

• Relevance ranked (based on parsed search)
• Facetted Browsing (for tags, LSCH, format, etc.)
• FRBRized results
• Book Cover Images
• People who used your search terms ultimately checked out....
• Choice of ways to view the result list (i.e. visualizations or lists)?
• Marked lists (portable, so I should be able to come back to them later)

Individual Records

• Tagging (is there a way to make public/private tags as well as local/global tags?)
• Related works
• Other versions of this work
• Tables of Contents
• Book Cover Images
• Stable URLs
• Search inside (where full text is available)
• When a checked out item will be availabe, how many holds there are, and choices if patron can't wait
• Reviews/annotations
• Ratings
• Some clue as to why each record was returned (highlight terms in red, for example)

Truly wishful thinking

• Drag-and-drop from result lists to workspace/word doc/etc