I was interested to come across the Encore implementation at the University of Glasgow. This is still in development, but here is a description of current features …
Encore is a new way of searching the Library catalogue offering:
- single search box
- relevance ranked results
- location & availability details
- links to electronic resources
- easy ways to refine (limit) your search
- recently added books on your topic
- a subject tag cloud around your topic
My eye was drawn to the images pulled in by Yahoo Web Services (this sometimes worked very well, as in the example above, sometimes less well), and to the subject tag cloud. I wondered what processing was done on subject data to generate the cloud.
I liked being shown which fields accounted for the retrieval (top of the ‘refine by’ column) and seeing new additions.
Interestingly, the tags here are used to refine the search. Of course, they could also be used to expand the search. I wonder do people have expectations either way here when they see ‘tags’?
