Comments on: What’s in a Web Site: Collections Search

By: stephen poole

stephen poole — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:39:04 +0000

Great looking site will have hours of fun looking through it thanks …

By: Emily

Emily — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:11:56 +0000

I think you should be able to search by accession number in addition to name, artist, etc.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:17:05 +0000

I think one of the coolest features is that you can easily grab a url for your search too. Say you wanted to share a search of skulls with “has image” checked on.

http://www.imamuseum.org/art/collections/search#search=skull&has_image=1&limit=20

By: Charlie

Charlie — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:28:05 +0000

Thanks for the feedback guys. We absolutely have a lot of data cleanup to do, but some of this would have never been discovered if we simply printed this information on the record pages. Tools like this are proving to help us internally as much as the web site visitor.

By: Nate Solas

Nate Solas — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:00:34 +0000

Wow, you’ve already fixed the things I was going to tell you about (tag searches used to be sticky with no way to turn them off, materials didn’t seem to be indexed). Two things I can think of offhand:

- it seems like you’ve got the AJAX back button implementation half-working. It changes the URL hash correctly, but it seems like the timer that’s supposed to be watching for that change and reloading the page isn’t firing? I’m on the latest unstable Chrome on Linux, if maybe it’s just me?
- the fields driving the autocomplete for Materials and Object Type are a bit raw. Two quick examples: type “cer” into Materials, and there’s a misspelled “cermaic” (that then returns nothing?), and then type “photo” into either field. The Materials field is full of variations on that word, and even the Object Type has both “photograph” and “photographs” (although those seem to stem to the same actual result set). We had a big struggle with this same problem and ended up pretty aggressively reducing terms to a common theme, so people could actually find all the photographs regardless of initial classification by the registrars. Not sure if something like that is practical?

Ooh, finally, seems like Object Type isn’t in the index. I was going to try a search for “photograph” in the keyword field to see if that actually gave me the results for every photograph, but it doesn’t pick up the ones in Object Type. To see it more easily, pick “photoaquatint” from Object Type, then add this same word as a keyword – drops to 0 results.

These are nitpicky little things, though, from a guy who just spent way too long thinking about collection search for his MW paper. Overall, I stand by my initial tweet: phenomenal, and I’m stealing everything. The addition of filters by Artist and Tag is a great one.

(And I second Michael’s wish for more post-launch reporting! Are people using the Materials field or still typing “painting” into the keyword field?)

By: Michael Jenkins

Michael Jenkins — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:19:52 +0000

I dig the date slider. I hope that a few months from now, after you have use stats, you will post on what worked and didn’t work with the collections search design.

Keep up the good work!