Notable in this release are improvements made to book bag menus and processes, implementation of Bootstrap 3 style updates and a relevancy override for commonly searched terms.

Details regarding the last of these may be of particular interest:

The CLIO catalog has around 9 million MARC records, supplied by a variety of organizations following a variety of cataloging practices.  For any given patron query, the top records returned from the search engine are not always those we’d like to see at the top of this list.

The CLIO implementation team is exploring approaches to relevance boosting in search results. Analysis of the top 100 most commonly executed searches identified an initial set of 20 queries where a search against the data as cataloged in the MARC record did not return the “right” record early enough in the search results.  There are various reasons for this, including:

• Multiple records for the same resource, with one preferred by subject specialists
• Multiple resources of the same name, with one preferred by subject specialists
• A resource is commonly referred to by a name which not it’s cataloged title, or not even present in the MARC record
• A common misspelling of the resource name

In our current approach, 20 bib records were given an artificial “999” field before being indexed, and the search engine was configured to boost terms matched against the “999” field more than any other field.

The result is that searches for boosted terms (“CLIO”, “Ancestry”, “The New Yorker”, “Web of Knowlege”, CAIM, RILM, etc.) return the librarian-selected bib records at the top of the search results.

We are still tuning our implementation, and evaluating whether the boosts of these resources adversely affect the discovery of other items.

We welcome comments and suggestions for improving CLIO.  Please comment below, use the Suggestions & Feedback form under the “Help” menu in the upper right corner of CLIO, or Ask a Librarian.