The TRLN Discovery development team recently deployed a few different and exciting changes to the shared catalog and discovery layers. These changes are summarized below, but may not be deployed to each institution’s local discovery layer yet. The inclusion of these changes may vary depending on your institution. Our release notes include more information about these updates.
- Users can search for variants of a name in the LOC authority and will return all results associated with that name. This allows users to more easily find all records associated with a person, place, or organization included in the LCNAF. Alternate or variant names might include name changes, various romanizations, and pseudonyms. A URI must be associated with a record in order to search variants’ names.
- There is now a spellcheck function that will provide users with a set of suggestions based on the spelling of their query. If their query has no results based on the spelling provided, they will see a prompt asking “Did you mean” followed by a set of suggested queries they can select to see results. Search suggestions only display when there are 5 or fewer results.
- The suggestions are based on actual words in the catalog index, not a dictionary, so the suggestions themselves may not be spelled correctly but should always produce search results.
- Some misspelled queries will not produce search suggestions because there are matches in the catalog.
- When a user searches their local catalog, they will not receive suggestions for items owned by other institutions.