[Sigia-l] Resources for Database Search Screens?

[Avi Rappoport]

What an interesting question!

The trick with advanced search features is to ask people what kinds 
of things they will look for, and try to find them yourself.  If you 
can't talk to actual users, ask the reference librarians and/or the 
info desk people, you can get some great examples and, if you try, 
analysis of the kinds of research people are doing.  You'll probably 
run up against some limitations of your content, both coverage and 
metadata.

Some options are not entirely obvious, such as search by date range 
(you can pre-calculate decades to make things easier) and location. 
For music, people would want to search by all sorts of criteria, such 
as composer, lyricist, performers associated with the song (probably 
not in your databases...).

As for interface, very few people will ever see your advanced search, 
so more is better.  Marti Hearst has research saying that users love 
the checkboxes in the Epicurious.com advanced search, because all the 
options are exposed.   But they have trouble with retrieval because 
the implications of the actions are not clear -- it's easy to get 
searches which are much to specific to retrieve *anything*.

Her work on faceted search at 
<http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/flamenco.html> is great, but it 
does require a lot of work on consistent metadata.

Good luck!

Avi


At 4:35 PM -0400 5/1/02,  Mary Taylor wrote:
>Greetings SIGIA Folks -I'm longtime lurker but not-too-frequent poster
>who's banging her head against how to put together the search screens
>for an database of digitized historical items (photos, sheet music,
>railroad timetables, tintypes...).  I've reviewed a couple of websites
>with image databases (such as the National Gallery of Art) and am trying
>to come up with an example to give our programmer of what fields to
>include in an "Advanced/Expert" search screen. At the moment the plan is
>to have a Basic/Keyword search which would scan the Title, Subject, and
>Description fields (rather than forcing the user to deal w/LC subject
>headings) but we need to come up with an option for more detailed
>searches.  It may be procrastination on my part, but I wish I had some
>examples of what types of screens worked/didn't work or if there was a
>really good example of how to create a detailed/Boolean search screen
>that wouldn't scare off the local history buffs and 4th graders we're
>designing this project for.

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