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Category: Tools and Technology

Single Search Box: a rant in several statements

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

Just because the single search box works for Google does not mean that it works for everything.

Even Google provides advanced search options, and they are often the only way to a) find what you need, b) see what search techniques are possible, and c) learn the search tags that you can later use when constructing complex searches in that hallowed single search box.

The only thing more frustrating than too much information is not enough information.

Searcher’s block is a common malady afflicting people faced with no guidance about what kinds of searching might be possible.

If you don’t believe me, just try finding your particular (pre-ISBN) version of the Agatha Christie mystery Curtain in LibraryThing. There’s a single search box for you… I love LibraryThing, but I HATE finding old books that don’t have ISBNs and that have common words for titles. It took me forever to learn that if I just put information in the right order (and separated by commas), I could replicate an advanced search. In the mean time I’d gone through gallons of tea in an attempt to keep myself from pulling out my hair or dropping the project altogether.

I’m inclined to believe that the popularity of Google’s single search box has more to do with the algorithm running behind the search than with the box itself. If my catalog could rank keyword results as well, I might be more inclined to go that route. But it can’t. So I’m in no way inclined.

Nuf said.

Good night.

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LibraryThinged

Published by Iris on Monday, January 1st, 2007

Because I’m a nerd, I spent much of my holiday weekend listening to NPR and cataloging my books in LibraryThing. Here’s what I wrote about my collection:

I’ve always been a heavy library user, so the books that I keep at home tend to fall into three categories: things I read in college and grad school, things I’ve read on planes or vacation, or things I can’t get at my local libraries. I also have a small collection of juvenile fiction that I read when I was young and thought might go out of print and get deselected from libraries. I probably won’t be very disciplined about including library books that I borrow in this collection.

I can’t figure out if I’m glad or sorry that I started this project after weeding my collection down to half or a third of what it used to be. I’m pretty sure I’m glad, though, because working on my laptop (without a convenient number pad) typing in all those ISBNs is a pain. I also discovered that I have a LOT of books that don’t have ISBNs. Those are a major pain to find and enter. I spent the longest time searching for a record for my 1930 edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I’d put off even looking at LibraryThing until last month mostly because it sounded like just the sort of thing I’d get addicted to and spend way too much time doing. But finally the call of another mode for sharing and organizing stuff became too strong for me and I caved.

Still, even though I had a lot of fun and can see this becoming as much a part of my life as my Flickr and del.icio.us have become, there are a couple of things I’d like to be able to do but can’t. I’m still not sure if I can’t because there is no way, or because I haven’t figured out the way, but here goes.

What I wish I could do (or may be able to do but can’t figure out how):

  • Sort by multiple fields at the same time
  • See who has added me to their watch list, or who other people are watching (a la del.icio.us networking or Flickr contacts)
  • Click on tags other people have given to my book, or selections from my own tags, in order to tag my books. (I hated going back after a couple of days and finding that I’d been hyphenating some works at one point and not later one.)
  • Batch editing/merging of tags.
  • Public/Private comments
  • Fields for translators/illustrators
  • “Advanced search” of multiple fields (like title, author, date, and publisher) to cover those times when you run into a whole shelf of books with no ISBNs.

I’ve found a couple of familiar people out there and added them to my watch list, but only a very, very few. Anybody out there who wants to share your LibraryThing name?

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Blogger Baby Formatting Issue

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 21st, 2006

Ok, does anyone know why the line spacing in my posts changes after a blockquote or a list? Look, for instance, at this post. What’s up with the bottom half? I’ve looked at HTML of the post itself and can’t see anything different, but somehow once it gets published it squishes itself. And as we all know, I’m not the world’s greatest wiz at code trouble shooting….

I shouldn’t be this annoyed with it. Everything else went pretty well (except that I don’t like my pegasus picture to be skewered by the dividing line…). It’s just the little stuff that kept me up late, made me sleep through my alarm and have to rush through breakfast and making my lunch and all that other good morning stuff.

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Well, It’s a Start

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 21st, 2006

I got the blog migrated. Then I spent more time than I’d care to divulge applying “labels” (why can’t they call them categories or tags?), which was fun. But I’ve done just about everything I can to make it look like the old blog I’ve come to know and love… with only moderate success. There are some weird formatting issues that I can’t figure out, and I’m too tired and confused to even know how to ask for help.

And what’s with the itty bitty font for the blog archives? Is this kind? I’ll need to pass out complimentary magnifying glasses to my subscribers, sort of like the OED in 4 volumes instead of two dozen.

But now it’s way, way past my bedtime, so I’ll try to stop thinking in blogger code and start composing myself for rest. Wish me luck…

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