Fix the Search
The Quick Search should work as well as the Advanced Search, and both need better ranking of results so that the titles I expect to see are at the top of the page.
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Thanks very much for such detailed feedback. Do you find that the drop-down for "Title" from the Quick Search is useful at all, or provides similarly relevant results as the "ti" option that you referenced from worldcat? Or do you only choose the Advanced Search page over the Quick Search toolbar?
Is there any reason that you wouldn't use OASIS for an unknown item search, over a resource like Amazon?
Would you find it useful to be able to include binding and other descriptors in the keyword search, or would it be too frustrating to have to learn another vernacular for the different fields?
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Jared Cowing commented
This is a good general suggestion, though the devil is in the details of what makes for a more robust keyword search. Perhaps it might be helpful to offer what kind of searches we use: Most of our searches in OASIS are known-item title + author entered into the keyword search box. If I know that I want a DVD, I usually have to additionally go to the "binding" advanced search filter and choose Region 0 dvd + Region 1 dvd + bluray-dvd.
Overall, it seems like known-item searching for items with short titles is a headache. It improves when I do an advanced search and use a title search with "exact" checked, so maybe if that's a popular enough search type, there could be a quick way to enter that type of search into the "quick search" (like how in worldcat we can type ti:"how to draw" into the general keyword box)I never use OASIS to find items that I don't already know about, but I'm ok with that (Amazon, WorldCat, and Choice are all great ways to surface overlooked titles and in my opinion OASIS doesn't need to try and replicate each of those systems' unique strengths for discovery).
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Anonymous commented
I agree. The KW search often fails to find known items and does a poor job at relevance.
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Anonymous commented
I usually use Amazon to "discover" titles then try to find them in Pasis