2017-10-11 Strategic Partners Group

Just finished a sprint - 2 week development cycles

• Focused on search functionality - both basic and advanced searching
• Making customizations and changes to the boosting structure in Solr (the underlying index that Blacklight will display content from)

Listing test queries and notating the expected results

• Can then hand off to developers who can modify boost settings so that those results get to the top
• Example: known item searching - this is not working so well in Primo
  • Complicated by different versions, adaptations, editions, etc.
• First step is to document the different types of queries and the results that we expect
• What are some examples of a conflicting results?
  • For some items, there might be multiple records for different versions (i.e. physical, electronic, video, etc)
  • Journals - most have a primary match, but there are variations on the name (i.e. Journal of Physical Review A, Journal of Physical Review B)
  • Author search - does the patron want books by that author or about that author
  • Title search - patron does a search on "Maus" as a title, but there are a lot of authors whose last names have "Maus"
  • What would we expect when entering a search for "Philadelphia"
  • Emily will put together a small team to review these queries
• Do we want to have test queries that we know will be successful - focus on more streamline queries or focus on outliers?
• Would it also be helpful to think about what metadata in the record could help the patron drill down? How many facets away?
  • Are there ways other than ranking that might be helpful to patrons
• We also have Summon raw search data that we can use to draft some queries
  • The Summon documentation is very descriptive about their search rankings and configuration
    • https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Summon/Product_Documentation/Overview_of_The_Summon_Service/The_Summon_Index/Summon%3A_Origin_of_Summon_Records%2C_and_Match_and_Merge
      https://knowledge.exlibrisgroup.com/Summon/Product_Documentation/Searching_in_The_Summon_Service/Search_Results/Summon%3A_Relevance_Ranking
  • Primo is more limited in terms of modifications and documentation

• Popular search report - top queries in the system - some might be librarians/library staff running tests
• Sample available data
  • In Analytics, you can see what facets are being used
  • Can also get user group if the person is logged in
  • All search data is anonymized
  • Could possible eliminate library staff user group from the logged in searches

Put the questions into Survey Monkey

Question of "Collections" - we highlight SCRC, but we have other collections as well

• Should we make this broader?
• Listed Special Collections Research Center
• We're already making a lot of assumptions about what we think of as important.

Help with Research

• This is too broad - could cover contacting a librarian, research guides, libchat
• We can ask the testers how they interpret "Help with researchers"
• Split this into two items: "Contact a librarian" and "Research Guides"

Testing the survey

• Will there be a debriefing with the testers to ask if these options make sense?
• We talked about testing with student workers and we can still do that
• Instead of using the ranking, we can use the scale - this might be less confusing to users
• Survey is available here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/W3FVC5P

Added/modified questions:

• Added: Last time you visited the library website, what did you do while you were there?
• Added: Please enter your email address if you are interested in participating in user testing with Temple University Libraries?
• Modified: The list of options is now a rating scale, not a ranking
• Modified: The free form question about other features or services: modified the wording so that it is not a yes/no question