CUL Discovery and Access

What are best bets and how do they work?

Best Bets is an index of the top 100 search queries from our Library website. The 100 top searches include everything put into the main search box on the home page, not just our website search. There is no automatic mechanism for updating this index; the list will be reviewed biannually and adjusted accordingly. This is […]

How does the bento/single search work?

The search box on the Library website searches our new Blacklight catalog, Summon, our Library websites and a “Best Bet” index for top search hits. Results are displayed in “bento boxes”: Articles returns the top results from a Journal Article search in Summon. Library Websites returns the top results of our Library websites using Google Custom […]

How does the ‘expand your search’ link work?

We’re not calling the Summon or Worldcat APIs directly, but using the bento_search gem’s adapters to facilitate both the requests to and parsing the responses from these APIs.

How do you intend to approach authorities search?

Our approach for authority records will have two separate focuses. We will have a separate browse interface that you would enter from a search box on the advanced search page. A user would enter a term in an author, subject or author-title field, and that would give them an alphabetical list of author, subject or […]

What is the logic behind the request button?

When an item (actually, a bib record) is requested, we first have the patron select a particular volume if the record is a multi-volume object. Then we look at every item record associated with the main bib record. For each item record, we determine the item type (book, map, etc.), its loan type (regular, day, […]