Databases Page Clarification

Hi Everyone – it was made clear recently that some folks are unaware of how the databases page on the new website will function; we have in fact re-written the code engine, incorporated the front-end portion into our unified API and presentation layer structure, and re-constructed the database to be more appropriate. There is also, of course, a new back end as well.

All of that being said, people can be sure that the front-end functionality has not changed, but has in fact become more useful. The three interface areas of Search, Title browse and Subject/Type browse remain, as we have always indicated. However, the Search function now performs a keyword search on all / chosen metadata fields including description, title, subject, type, etc. – this new functioning will make it much easier for users who need to locate a given resource by a keyword or term, or who can only recall a portion of a DB title, etc.

Additionally, all results are loaded into the DOM immediately and bootstrap/jquery is being used to sort through the results on the fly, so users will see immediate results as they type / use the interface, there are no page refreshes that need to occur to see results.

If you are staff/fac user currently with access to the page, you are seeing a development version, the new interface is being designed in a separate environment.

Prospective change to Language facet of Scout

Currently, records with incomplete or incorrect language metadata show up as “undetermined” in the Language facet of Scout.

languageFacetEDS

Instead of using the EBSCO default “undetermined”, we intend to describe the language of these records as “English or other.”  Most of the records with incorrect language metadata are in English, so a label that indicates as much makes sense from a usability perspective.

Unfortunately, correcting the metadata for all of these records isn’t practical.  Much of the incomplete or incorrect language metadata originates from vendors; when vendors update their records, any corrections made to these records would be overwritten.  Records from vendors that aren’t updated as frequently will be corrected, as will records representing physical pieces.

Please leave any feedback with regard to this change in the comments section.  This change is scheduled to be submitted to EBSCO on the morning of Friday, May 8th and is expected to take 1-2 weeks to go into effect.