[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Truncated searches in ASpace PUI

[Jordon Steele]

Hello,

We are new users to the PUI and noticed today (correct me if I’m wrong) that neither the old PUI nor the new PUI supports the ability for users to perform truncated searches without truncation operators like * and ?.  For example, one must type “histor*,” with quotes, to get search results containing the word history. One cannot merely type histor with no quotes (0 results).

Is this the case? Is there an existing ticket with a request to add this feature? And if this was a conscious decision not to have this feature, may I ask why?

Best,

Jordon

Jordon Steele
Hodson Curator of the University Archives
Special Collections
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
3400 N Charles St
Baltimore, MD 21218
410-516-5493
jsteele at jhu.edu

From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org [mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Custer, Mark
Sent: Monday, April 11, 2016 4:32 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group <archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>
Subject: Re: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Reference Staff training material?

I created something here for staff that addressed some of their questions about using advanced search in the staff interface.  A lot of their questions were particular to our local plugins, though, so those probably wouldn’t make much sense to everyone else.  However, in case it helps, here are two questions and answers from our current FAQ:


  1.  How do you truncate your search in ArchivesSpace?

You can truncate searches by using an asterisk (*) as a wildcard operator.  Using this technique, you can perform truncations on the end of your search as well as the beginning (the left-hand side).  For example, you can search for pop* as well as *pop.

If doing the latter search, you might wonder if you can filter out all of the results that just contain the string pop in them (e.g. you want records that have lollipop and afropop in their description, but not any with the word pop).  Well, of course you can!  Just throw in the not operator, and re-run this search:  *pop NOT pop (upper-casing the Boolean here is required in our setup), which you can also write as *pop -pop:

http://sandbox.archivesspace.org/search?utf8=✓&q=*pop+-pop

ArchivesSpace uses Solr, which in turn uses Lucene.  So, any search operator or technique available with those technologies is likely to be supported by ArchivesSpace (depending on how Solr is configured, which can be customized by every ArchivesSpace installation).


2.      Can you put a search in quotes to get results for a specific phrase?

You betcha.  By default, ArchivesSpace is setup to increase recall for basic searches, so you might want to use quotes to drill down to a more specific result set.

Here’s an example:  I’m looking for references to the play Cher Antoine. If I put those keywords into the search box without quotes, I’m going to get results that have either Cher or Antoine in them – only one search term has to match to be considered a match – but the relevancy ranking will bring most of the results that contain the play’s name to the top. Still, if I don’t want the other results at all, I can wrap up the query in quotes like so:

http://sandbox.archivesspace.org search?utf8=✓&q=%22cher+antoine%22<http://sandbox.archivesspace.org%20search?utf8=✓&q=%22cher+antoine%22>

(in the above URL, the quote characters are the two instances of %22, which is how double quotes are encoded in URLs)

I realize that this isn’t the training information that you asked about, but I just thought I’d share in case it’s of any use.




From: archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org> [mailto:archivesspace_users_group-bounces at lyralists.lyrasis.org] On Behalf Of Kari R Smith
Sent: Monday, 11 April, 2016 4:07 PM
To: Archivesspace Users Group (archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org<mailto:archivesspace_users_group at lyralists.lyrasis.org>)
Subject: [Archivesspace_Users_Group] Reference Staff training material?

Hello,
Has anyone developed local training material for reference archivists?  If so, would you be willing to share it?  And / or is there official ArchivesSpace community training material for reference archivists?  Activities I’m thinking of are like:  complex searching in both the staff and public interfaces and producing reports  / output that is useful for researchers (like a limited box list, search results, etc.)

Thank you!

Kari R. Smith, Digital Archivist
MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections
617-258-5568  |   smithkr (at) mit.edu
http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/

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