Discovery Service: Yale University Library Prepares to Launch Public Beta of “Quicksearch”

From the Yale Daily News:

In the coming weeks, Yale Library Information Technology will beta test a new search system called Quicksearch, slated to replace the current Orbis catalog in September 2015.
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“The library always had a multitude of systems that don’t necessarily talk to each other,” Chief Technology Officer for Yale Libraries Michael Dula said. “We are aiming to pull the resources available at Yale under one umbrella, starting with main library catalogue [Orbis] and law library catalogue. [MORRIS]”
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Systems Librarian Kalee Sprague said students and faculty voiced frustration regarding the current system structure, which requires two separate searches in both Orbis and MORRIS, the law library catalog.

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See Also: Info Page From the Yale Library Provides More Details
The Quicksearch service will include:

• Search for records in Orbis and MORRIS catalogs

• Search for articles from Summon

• Search for digitized material

The unified search relies on a Solr index and Blacklight interface. Search results from numerous sources will be brought back into the unified search using a “bento box” approach. In this method results from the catalogs will be in one box, results from Articles+ will be in a second, digitized material in a third, and so on. The bento box approach is used by several libraries participating in the Hydra consortium, notably Columbia’s CLIO. Yale is working closely with Columbia developers to adapt the Quicksearch code to Yale’s search resources.

See Also: Quicksearch Project Blog

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