I am of the persuasion that spring sports are meant to be played in spring - with warmer weather and none of this white stuff on the ground! With my griping out of the way, I am ready to report on website progress made:
1. Writing reviews - which has been disabled for fixing, is now operational again. There are some cosmetic changes still to be made, but the function is good!
2. We're working on adding content to the OnDemand tab.
3. Some minor fixes have been made in the Spanish page facets to get a couple of these working.
On a related note, I want to share a couple of things reported in a talk by Vanessa Fox, search-engine expert. She says "about a quarter of web searches are one word; another quarter two words; 3% are eight words or more.+" Is it any different when users come to the library website? I'm thinking yes, because many titles are more than two words, right? But if you consider author searches then maybe we're just entering two words.
One of the things we are discovering is that the more specific you can be in the search box, the better your chance of your result rising to the top. Here's a couple of examples:
*The Help by Kathryn Stockett. In the search box "The Help" is a title keyword search and "The" is a throw-away word not being searched so we are left with a myriad of hits based on "Help" in the title. But, try searching "The Help Stockett" and see where you find the title - on the first page of results!
*Here's another example. The movie "Up" is now out in DVD and available in libraries. Again, using a popular word alone in the search box returns way too many results. But ~ if you use "Up Asner" in the search box, you end up with the movie on the first page of results!
At least from a library point-of-view, a little more information will return more satisfying results. Try it and let me know what you find!
+Cited from Joseph Janes, "
Info the Woods," American Libraries, January/February 2010, p 34.
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