Fun Facts About Location Facets in GIL-Find

I've gotten a couple of questions about whether or not we can alphabetize the location facets in GIL-Find and why they're sorted the way they're sorted. So, here's the GIL-Find Location Facet 411.

When you do a search in GIL-Find, the location facets that you see on the left are in descending order by number of holdings. This is the way that most catalog/discovery layers work, and I doubt that the server site will want to change it. Even if they did want to change it, it wouldn't be good for us, and here's why.

The first level of location faceting only shows you five locations, then you have to click "more" to see others. If we used alpha order, that prime real estate would almost always be taken up by Alpharetta and Clarkston. Great for them, bad for the rest of you.

After you click more, you're not actually seeing ALL the locations. You're only seeing a truncated list. Eyeballing it, I'd guess 25-30. We have a squillion locations. Okay, not quite a squillion, but 157. In a more general search, there are actually locations that may have a few holdings for the search terms, but you're not seeing them because that list is truncated and the other locations with the most holdings are getting priority. Switch that to alpha order and you have a scenario where a location that only has one holding is bumping a location that might have 100+ holdings and be a better limiter for patrons. That, or Newton holdings would get bumped a lot. Again, not a good outcome for everyone.

So, you say, "Well, that makes sense, Tessa, but, durn it, I still want to limit searches to my campus' holdings!" Fear not! You can do that. You just have to do it in the Advanced Search.

http://gilfind.gpc.edu/vufind/Search/Advanced

Near the bottom of the limits of that search, you will see a Location limit. Select your location and perform your search. You will see other location facets available to you in the search results, but the search results should still be only holdings in your selected location.

Now, I notice that you can only select a single location in the Advanced Search. I'm about to email our GIL-Find Guy now to suggest an enhancement for selecting multiple locations.

Give me a holler if you have any questions about this!

Copying & Pasting Searches in GIL

Copying and pasting a title to use for a search in GIL is a great little time saver, particularly when checking for duplicates on your order slips, but there is a caveat. When copying and pasting from a webpage, you can carry over formatting that will cause your search to bomb out even if we own the title.

For example, we have McGraw-Hill’s GMAT. If you copy and paste that title into a GIL Classic exact title search, as is, you'll get a "no matches found" message, even though we own it. When you copy the title, you're getting a formatted, as opposed to plain text, apostrophe. GIL Classic is very literal, especially in the exact search. This is why it's more precise than GIL Find, but also more demanding. If you remove the apostrophe and search on McGraw-Hills GMAT (or delete the apostrophe and retype, which will be plain text), you'll get two hits.

This premise applies to any sort of potentially formatted punctuation, accent marks, etc. If you remove anything like that from a copy and paste search, it won't bomb out unless we really don't own the title.

The above applies only to GIL Classic. GIL-Find seems to just ignore punctuation. However, I'm not 100% certain of that. If you have a copy and paste search bomb out, in any catalog or search interface, and you feel like it shouldn't have, removing any punctuation and accent marks is always a good first step.