Vera Multi-Search: Documentation for Staff: MIT Libraries

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Vera Multi-Search

Feedback form | Fixes in progress | Things to be aware of

1. Only the first 30 hits are returned from each database... these are merged into one set and sorted by relevance. When you filter by one database, you are getting all the results, not just the first 30. If you go back to "show all", then it's just the first 30 from each again.

2. A database may sometimes be down or unreachable for various reasons, in that case it will show "timed out" or some other error message. best thing to do is try again later... if it seems consistently down, then report it.

3. "You searched in" shows links to native interfaces. We wanted to make the user's query go along with the click, but turned out not to be possible, so those links go to the search screen of each database, where you have to re-enter your search. This could be a good thing anyway, because you can usually do a more precise search in the native interface and take advantage of fielded searching.

4. The site is protected by our proxy server, so that users who are on campus or off-campus with MIT certificates in their browser can get in. Everyone else gets sent to this guest page:
http://libraries.mit.edu/vera-beta/index-guest.html

5. The e-journal title search is powered by our SFX Full Text Finder. That's why it has certain choices in the menu: contains, begins with, exact match... those are what's available in that tool.

6. The e-journal A-Z list is powered by the SFX Knowledgebase. We have customized the screens to look like part of the same application, but you'll see the URL is owens.mit.edu... (that's our SFX server). We still have some work to do to make sure the SFX KnowledgeBase matches our true holdings from the old Vera for e-journal listings. (making sure specially imported titles are all there, etc)

7. We are dependent on what each database will return via its z39.50 or xml connection... we can't always get all the metadata to appear that you would see in the native interface.

8. The default is keyword. you can do a phrase search by putting quotes around the phrase (a la google).
The ERIC database and Art Abstracts fails when you do a quoted search (we need to find a workaround for this)... other databases may fail... please report them.

9. We haven't conducted a stress test yet. Now that you all have the URL it will be the first time lots of people are hitting it at once. We don't anticipate problems, but be aware that anything could happen (and we'll fix it). At some point we may ask for a group of volunteers to use it all at once during the same hour.