The Gordian Knot

Sites currently in stages of training and migration and setup should definitely download the “In Deck Sing” session handouts from Shelley Neville, the closest thing to documentation I have seen yet for understanding the complexity of indexing, filtering, and limiting. On initial blush, despite her expertise, I can see myself taking the whole six months of migration just fiddling with the marc mapping and indexing in order to get myself anywhere near her expertise and understanding. Some good things and bad things: no marc bib public view is ready for 8x yet (”Coming!”) ; Analytics (787 tag) have been demonstrated, so all is not lost in that category; and digital images (followed by enriched content — Coming!) are now pulling into the staff cat display for verification, and, well, color. Format icons can now be displayed in staff pac, and a fairly comprehensive tri-panel approach with fairly robust mouseover hovers is also coming for more complete title/summary/holdings displays. Synonyms and acronyms have been restored, and spell check, thesaurus, and phrase searches are in the plan but (coming!). Just watch out for those normalizers and processors! Rumor has it that some real, paper documentation on indexes is also in the works.

Great quotes from the session:

“This is being fixed… because it’s not very helpful.”
“The right click will become your friend.”
“For a lot of people it is fraught with peril [editing the query string in default limits]… including me…”
“We are reminded daily we need more documentation.” (all Shelley Neville)

and

“You have made many people happy… so long as we can wait two years…” — Kathy Crouse