Today's post revolves around Prospector, that button which is so well-loved by staff but an unrealized potential to much of our public. A big Yea and Thanks go to David for working his magic within the catalog to make this a realized potential instead! Check out the page when you get your search results. You will now see great changes to the left hand side where the Prospector button resides as well as when you are at the "search our catalog" page. If I could easily remember how to copy a web page, then you would be actually seeing this in living color on this blog. For lack of time, here's a URL to a page.
What do you think of these changes?
3 comments:
Well done, David! This is a great improvement, thanks so much for doing this. I'm sure our patrons will be pleased with what they may think is a "new service"!
Nice job!
Can similar explanation be added next to the prospector button at the top of the page when ALD doesn't own the item?
This can include the "no matches found" response or a list of titles that doesn't include the title/format that the patron was looking for.
My remaining challenge is to add the Prospector promotional material to the top of the page, where the Prospector button shows up, when viewing a list of results, and adding it to the "Your entry would be here . . ." message we see when a non-keyword search is unsuccessful.
Unfortunately, at this time, both of those areas are just out of my reach in the III code. We have limited customizability (is that a word?) in the catalog, and these are two areas where the system won't let me add hyperlinks or additional text.
We'll keep looking at ways to sneak around the rules, while encouraging III to allow for more customization. In the meantime we hope that promoting Prospector as much as we can in other places will get more patrons using this service.
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