.
MHLS is entering into the testing phase of our development partner work for Vega Discover, Innovative’s new discovery platform and public access catalog. The platform is still in development, and while other development partners have gone live, the platform is in its infancy. We are among the first consortia members to test Vega Discover. The entries below are known issues that we are working with the vendor, Innovative, to resolve. Our role as development partners is to identify issues and enhancements that we would like to see. Once identified, they may be quickly addressed, be reviewed for future enhancement, and possibly dismissed if other development partners do not prioritize a resolution for the product’s roadmap.
Use the search box to find entries.
Observation: The Physical Description information for some items does not show the full description. This can be an issue for things like mixed media kits, which are cut off before you can see what is included.
Reported: 1/24/2022
Status: Innovative will implement a bug fix so that subfield e of the physical description in MARC records is not hidden.
Resolution: TBA.
Observation: Some records display a range of dates for the publication date of a work because of the way different editions and formats “roll up” together. This is generated by including all years when editions and formats of a work were published or copyrighted, but this might create confusion in some cases, such as when patrons expect to see only one date associated with a given season of a TV show.
In Encore, the original copyright date is in brackets, which may be preferred.
Reported: 11/04/2021
Resolution: Expanding the Edition information section will show the various publication dates of a given format, including the original copyright date.
The display is different in Encore because each bibliographic record is completely separate, while in Vega, they “roll up” in order to show patrons all possible manifestations of the same work.
To display only one date, a new setting would have to be added to show only the earliest publication/copyright date (that exists in the MHLS catalog, which would not necessarily be the original date of publication) or to display both a range of publication dates and the earliest date.
Note: the label has been fixed from “publicationinfo” to “Published.”
Observation: Staff have reported difficulty understanding where certain information is located within a resource page. This includes the content of the two Related and Details tabs and the order of that content. For example, author information and a list of their other books are located at the bottom of the Details tab. A reviewer has expressed that they would like this section to be more prominent. “You May Also Like” and “More in this Series” also appear under Details although they would seemingly make more sense under Related.
The author, illustrator, and other contributors appear part-way down the Related tab, although they could reasonably be considered part of the details of a particular work. Similarly, a list of topics appear under Related, even though they could be details.
Reported: 11/04/2021
Status: MHLS will look into configuring pages further and working with how information is integrated, such as through Syndetics Unbound.
Resolution: TBD.
Observation: Knowing where to look for call numbers/self locations and having to click through and scroll to find that information seems like too many steps.
Reported: 12/2/2021
Status: Currently, the call number can be viewed in two ways: 1.) by clicking on a location name or 2.) by expanding the Edition Information, then expanding one of the editions. See the images below for a visual aid.
Resolution: MHLS can make changes to the text to make the next step more obvious, such as “On shelf at one or more locations – select a library from the list below to get shelf location information“. This will be updated soon.
Observation: This would be a very helpful addition, especially when searching under Concepts.
Reported: 12/2/2021
Status: This is a long-standing deficiency in our record structure, but the integration with Syndetics may provide some help here. Mid-Hudson continues to work on it.
Resolution: TBD.
Observation: For example, a search for “genealogy periodicals” in Concept brings up no results at Adriance, despite the fact that they have many materials classified as such in Sierra.
It appears that the concept Genealogy–Periodicals only includes resources with that exact subject heading in Sierra and not those with “genealogy periodicals” as parts of a subdivision, such as “United States — Genealogy — Periodicals” or “New York (State) — Genealogy — Periodicals — Indexes.” Searching by keyword (All) instead of Concept provides some more results, but not as many as in Encore.
Improvements to the Concepts feature are needed in order to better capture the items that would reasonably be considered to be part of a concept, especially in regard to subject heading subdivisions and related subject headings for Concepts that are based on traditional library subject headings.
Reported: 12/2/2021
Status: MHLS will report the issue to Innovative and push for improvements to Concepts.
Resolution: TBD.
Observation: When results are found which do not include all keyword search terms, the result summary shows the unfound elements as “missing” with the term in a strikethrough font.
Encore does not show these results.
Reported: 11/18/21
Resolution: A phrase in quotes (when looking for exact phrase) resolves this. I am not sure that all keyword searches are phrases.
Observation: Searching for “It” under Title or All returns no results. “it stephen king” returns 1782 results, the same number as just searching “stephen king.” It seems like the word “it” is not searchable. The same thing happens with the words “and,” “the,” “of,” “if,” “in,” and “or.” This is especially a problem for the popular Stephen King book, but could potentially impact other works with unusual titles.
Reported: 12/2/2021
Resolution: Innovative has implemented a fix and short words are now searchable.
Observation: Caused by slight differences in titles such as punctuation or “a novel” appearing in some bib records and not others, and differences in author names, such as some OverDrive records not using authorized versions of names.
Reported: 10/2/2021
Resolution: Enhancement on 11/22/21 should have improved this by normalizing the authors and titles. Punctuation will be ignored, phrases like “A Novel” will be ignored. Updates to the MHLS catalog to fix errors in bibliographic records or standardize the information in these fields will also help the results roll up. Please report any roll-up issues you find by emailing techsupport@midhudson.org or cataloging@midhudson.org.
Observation: Searches do not always bring up the most relevant titles as the first results, according to our testing. Encore seems to do a better job at this.
Reported: 09/15/21
Resolution: Improvements have been made to the relevancy algorithm that give greater weight to exact title matches and the number of copies of a title in the system.
Please report if you still have any issues with search result order by emailing techsupport@midhudson.org or filling out the feedback form.
