Email libautoSingleSearch Screen Shots (Library Technologies Core Services)
Screen Shots ? SingleSearch ?
The Indiana University Bloomington Libraries have incorporated SingleSearch into the Find Information portion of the Libraries? web site.
Our local SingleSearch implementation is called: OneSearch@IU.
Check boxes and a search box for SingleSearch appear in the Databases by Subject pages. This is the page for Economics.
Through our web site Content Management system, the subject page editor may designate up to 8 databases to be search by default.
The check boxes also appear on the pages for subject libraries and collections. They are linked from the Recommended Resources menu.
The Libraries have created a page for a QuickSearch that brings together 8 multi-disciplinary resources to effectively cover all subject areas. This page is accessible from every SingleSearch page and from the Libraries? home page.
This page is created to be a copy of the look and feel of the SingleSearch pages, but is actually a page created in our Content Management system. That allows us to get a separate URL for the page to be able to put it or a search box in other places.
All databases are turned on by default.
The ?Sources by Subject? pull down list is the list of all the pages in our Databases by Subject section of the web site. Choosing one takes the user directly to one of those pages.
We have also created a page that automatically adds new titles put into the SingleSearch system. It is called All OneSearch Sources. A link to it appears on all SingleSearch screens.
On this page, no database may be chosen to be searched as a default.
We have kept most of the parts of the SingleSearch search pages. We did change the colors to match our statewide library catalog.
We found that printing and emailing were confusing in the original screens. As a result, we revised the action options on the left side of the screen to make it clearer to the user what he or she was doing.
We kept the basic search defaults of finding 10 citations at a time and displaying 10 on a page. Our usability testing showed that this worked best.
We set the default display to the ?long? display to give users as much help as possible in selecting resources. There is great variability among the displays for various vendors/databases. The long view worked best for all resources.
We have also removed some links:
Go To ? Our usability tests showed that users could not figure out that this was actually a link to the citation. Instead, we use the title link for this purpose.
Link to the Open URL service ? We instead rely on the Open URL link inside the native interface. We are rethinking that option and will do additional usability tests on this button.
We have also made the ability to ask for more citations more prominent at the end of the last page of citations:
?Show/Print Marked Titles? is confusing for users. We added an extra screen for people who use this option.
We removed a number of options from the Search Settings box. We kept the default sort at ?Fastest First? because it gives users results quickly. We will test relevance sorting in our upcoming usability tests.
We also changed the layout of the screen a little to make it easier to see how to save changed settings.
We also found that the Workroom had a lot of extraneous stuff in it that was causing confusion. We have done two things:
1. Renamed it My OneSearch.
2. Removed some of the buttons and columns in the display to make it cleaner and easier to understand.
When users email a record to themselves, we have stripped out the URL for the article because we have found that it does not persist for more than a few days.
Instead, we include a link to the ?article linker? in SFX that allows users to type in a citation and immediately go to the full text.
