New Items on New Site (a preview)

You may have been been asking yourselves "Why hasn't Alan H. posted lately?" (or perhaps you haven't, but let me preserve some of my ego). The summer & September have been a very busy time for me, and a big part of my work has been building parts of the new website that take advantage of our Endeca search technology. 

This post previews some of the work we're doing to improve access to newly-added library collection items (one of the biggest feature requests of the existing website).  Some of this is a bit technical, but I've tried to emphasize the practical results here.

More information on our new faceted search technology is in the posts here and here, but the short version is that our new site will have a much more robust search for nearly everything the library does--not just collections like books and DVDs, but also our programs, locations, blog content, etc.

The search is also capable of some sophisticated filtering by many different possible fields. One of the fields now available is the date an item was added to our collection, which is the most important building block of our redesigned newest titles section.

Currently, the Our Newest Titles list is generated on the 15th of each month for some popular categories of items.  It's a frequently used section of the site and we get a lot of feedback about it from you. We commonly hear that:

• The period covered by these lists is unclear
• The lists are often very long and not sortable, so browsing them is difficult
• It's not possible to see lists of new items for previous months

We agree with all of this, so I'm glad to say that our new design can address all these points.  Here's a few screenshots (these are, obviously, not final designs):

Period of Time Covered

Period of time covered is (hopefully) clear. The list also generated at the time the page is requested, rather than as part of a monthly report--so they can change from day to day as new items are added.

Sortable Lists

Currently sortable (ascending or descending) by title and author.  It's possible for us to add other sorts as well if they seem useful, as the new site's framework is very modular.

Back In Time

Go back a month:

Or a year (past a certain point, these probably stop being "new items", but hey, why not?):

More Screens

Here's some (large) screenshots showing more of the new items display in action, click to view in full size:

 

The Bigger Picture

Many of our choices about underlying technology and design for the new website have been influenced by the thoughts of people like Daniel Burka, designer of Digg, Firefox and many other great web based technology, (the link goes to a long presentation he gave last year at the Future of Web Design conference).  After site launch we want to continue to improve the site in regular ways based on user feedback. So our data, our faceted search engine and our site technologies are all quite flexible.

Most of my work has taken place on the "top" layer of the site building pages like the New Items display pages that provide various views of our data.  This has been done mostly through component reuse--for example, the Sort feature on the page is a reusable chunk of code that can be placed anywhere on the site and customized, but largely figures out how it should be behaving based on the page context it's appearing in.

What this means in a practical sense (what most of you probably care about) is that our turnaround time on new features and site improvements should be quicker after our new site launch.  Eventually we envision things like user-customizable New Items page (keep personalized track of genres, authors, subjects etc that interest you) or other remixings.

There will probably be some changes to the revised New Items pages before (and after) our launch, based on testing and user feedback.  Some of our design choices are influenced by what we know about how you use the current Our Newest Titles page and how you've told us you'd like it to be better.  But we're aware usage may change on the new site because the new search has many more features than our current one.  So we'll be listening closely during our upcoming public beta and afterwards, and refining the site in the years to come.

Looking Ahead to Faceted Searching - Part 2

In the last post we discussed the history of library search technology as a lead-up to our forthcoming addition of faceted search to the library catalogue. 

But we didn't say all that much about what faceted search is.  So what is faceted searching and why is it exciting for improving the library catalogue?

Faceted Search Defined

A search of the web will turn up quite a few results for the question "what is faceted search?"; I like the definition offered by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR does a lot of work in areas of computer technology of specific interest to libraries):

The web search world, since its very beginning, has offered two paradigms:

• Navigational search uses a hierarchy structure (taxonomy) to enable users to browse the information space by iteratively narrowing the scope of their quest in a predetermined order, as exemplified by Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, etc.
• Direct search allows users to simply write their queries as a bag of words in a text box. This approach has been made enormously popular by Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Search.

Over the last few years, the direct search paradigm has gained dominance and the navigational approach became less and less popular. Recently a new approach has emerged, combining both paradigms, namely the faceted search approach. Faceted search enables users to navigate a multi-dimensional information space by combining text search with a progressive narrowing of choices in each dimension.

From a 2006 SIGIR conference on faceted search

An Old Idea in the Library World

Faceted search as an idea is related to (though not identical with) the concept of faceted classification, a fairly old idea in the library world.  See the Bliss Classification System or the Colon Classification System, both developed by librarians who considered the Dewey Decimal Classification System insufficient for describing and categorizing the richly varied world of information.

"Navigate a multi-dimensional information space"

A piece of information (let's say a book from here on out for the sake of convenience) has many different possible points of access that might be of interest to someone looking for it.  This is where the "facets" terminology comes from--each possible access point is one "facet" of the whole piece of information.

Some of these are "flat", such as the name of an author or the title of a book, but for others it may be possible to identify a hierarchy from general to specific, such as for geographic area of coverage:

• Earth > North America > Canada > Ontario > Toronto

A huge range of possible books exist within the geographic coverage of "Earth".  A narrower subset of that range geographically covers "North America", and a narrower subset within that covers "Canada".   And so on... You could also consider more granular hierarchies such as having "Western Hemisphere" between "Earth" and "North American Continent".

But hierarchical subject browsing based on a subject heading system such as the Library of Congress' has been a feature of some online library catalogues in the past.  The real power of faceted searching comes with...

"Combining text search with a progressive narrowing of choices in each dimension"

You may already use faceted search and not realize it.  The ability to start with a free-text search and then narrow down your results within various dimensions is a common one on e-commerce sites:

The screenshot to the right show the websites of Canadian Tire and eBay using faceted search to narrow within a free-text search.

You get a lot of power from this ability to search freely and then progressively narrow your search by the available facets of the retrieved results.  Ideally you get the best of both worlds in a user-friendly manner--you can look for whatever you want, but the system will then progressively guide you through its particular information structure to improve precision, eliminate false hits, and help you find information that's on target.

If you've asked a librarian to look up a book (we have 99 branches to do this at if you feel the need) you've probably seen them pull relevant results very quickly, because librarians have extensive training in (among other things) the particular way in which catalogue records are organized.

A big part of what the web team hopes to do with faceted search is leverage our existing structured records (subject headings and other access points in the catalogue record) to make searching easier without having pre-existing knowledge of how the information is organized##.

Faceted Search Technology and the Library

For an example of faceted search working in a library catalogue, you can visit the North Carolina State University Library.

The specific faceted search technology we'll be using is made by Endeca.  An interview with one of the founders in 2008 gives some insights into the origins of the technology (and it warms my librarian heart to see the acknowledgement of S.R. Ranganathan as one of the original thinkers of faceted search).

The web team aims to have faceted search technology in place for Toronto Public Library by late summer.  Watch this space for further announcements.