Paul,
The Oregon College of Oriental Medicine elected to use the Biblioweb software to make Acupuncture research available to our web-based audience. What we love about your product is the high customability of the web interface, and our department has invested a good number of hours modifying the look of the web interface to match our needs.
During a recent Beta-test of Biblioweb however we found some serious problems with the Advanced Search function. If these problems can not be fixed, it essentially renders your product useless for us. The issues are:
1) The "Not" function does not seem to work at all.
2) The Advanced Search is case sensitive. Users do not intuitively think to adjust case, this greatly influences search results, and is very confusing.
3) The Advanced Search does not appear to recongnize case sensitivity when the entry is entered in lower case (i.e. A term entered lower case will also find a capitalized version of the term).
4) Lastly, a search for a single keyword term will find that single keyword as well as multiple keyword terms containing that single term (i.e. a search for acupuncture, will find not simply "acupuncture" but also the keywords "chinese acupuncture" and "japanese acupuncture". With the "Not" function even working, this renders Biblioweb useless for us and our users. Targeted searches for specific keywords becomes impossible.
Please help us address these issue promptly. If we cannot resolve them or find a way to effectively work around them, our organization will not be able to continuing using your product.
Thank you,
Ben Marx
Research Associate
Oregon College of Oriental Medicine
Biblioweb Advanced Search
Paul,
I am curious if you have any simple solutions or suggestions for addressing the Advanced Search problems outlined in my last post. Have other users brought up these problems before? Do you find these same issues on your end when using the Biblioweb Advanced Search? Is there a patch that exists, or that you can write, to fix these issues?
We would love to continue using Biblioweb but don't feel comfortable disseminating to our school community without the Advanced Search working correctly.
Thanks,
Ben
Frustration with case sensitivity
Hi, Ben,
I have also been frustrated with the case sensitive searching. End users do not think about case sensitivity when searching. If it must be included, it would be nice to have an option to turn it off, if possible.
Tracie
I agree. It would be very
I agree. It would be very nice to have the option of disabling case sensitivity. Have you run into any other problems with the Advanced Search? The linking term "Not" does not seem to work at all for me.
Ben Marx
1. Can you give me an
1. Can you give me an example to show how the "Not" operator doesn't work? You can use the site: http://support.biblioscape.com:8001 to show this problem.
2. Advanced Search is always case sensitive. Full text search is case insensitive.
3. When building a search, BiblioWeb will convert a word to title case and search both terms. For example, if "potent" is entered, both "potent" and "Potent" will be searched.
4. Each keyword term is separated by "; ". If you want just "acupuncture", you can enter "; acupuncture" as a search term.
We are working on a complete rewrite of BiblioWeb. A beta test site will be available in the second quarter.
Hi Paul, Thank you for your
Hi Paul,
Thank you for your help, your suggestions make a big difference for performing advanced searches correctly.
One issue remains:
1) We are still having issues getting the "Not" function to work at all. It will not work in our version, however, it does work on your site. Please visit our website and try the advanced search: http://www.acutrials.ocom.edu.
Example: A keyword search for "dan shen" finds 5 articles. The addition of a NOT Keyword "ear" in the second line does not change the result. The AND and OR modifiers seem to work fine however.
How can we fix this?
Ben Marx
Ben Marx, Yes, I can
Ben Marx, Yes, I can reproduce it. It could be a bug. We don't have a fix for it now.
Paul, Thank you for getting
Paul,
Thank you for getting back to us.
Until this bug is fixed, we can't publish our database on the web with biblioscape. Our college needs this database up and available ASAP.
How soon could you fix this problem? Alternatively, we can hire someone to correct the problem and submit the bill to you.
Thanks,
Ben Marx
Ben, the problem is caused
Ben, the problem is caused by a bug in the database engine we use. That is why we don't have a immediate fix. The "Not" operator works when fields like Year is searched. We will try to get the problem fixed in March.
Paul, Thanks for your
Paul,
Thanks for your attention to the issue. Hopefully this bug can be corrected quickly.
I have identified two other issues:
1) When searching for a single keyword (such as finding only the term "acupuncture" and not other keywords which contain that term, such as "japanese acupuncture") placing a ";" before that term works. However, if that term is the first keyword in the list, and so does not have a ";" before it, the term is not found. How can I resolve this issue? ...all I want to do is generate an accurate search for a specific keyword I've placed in the keyword field!
2) When the Lookup Page displays an alphabetical list of terms, it appears to limit the length of characters allowed in a word (i.e. "semi-individualized acupuncture" appears as "semi-individualized acupuctur"). We have entered some long keywords and want them displayed completely for users. How can we correct this?
Thanks Paul,
Ben Marx
1. Sorry, I don't have a
1. Sorry, I don't have a good solution for this. My suggestion is to do a lookup search which will list each term separately.
2. You can run "...\Biblioscape 8\Tools\DBSys.exe". Go to "Utilities | Restructure". Click the "Select..." button and go to your database folder. From the Available tables list, select the table "kw_x". You can then increase the "Keyword" field length from 30 to a higher number.
Hi Paul, Thank you for the
Hi Paul,
Thank you for the Advanced Search NOT patch. It worked great.
When I try to change the keyword field length it gives me the error message: Error #11013 Access Denied. How can I avoid this error?
Ben Marx
Ben, how was that done. When
Ben, how was that done. When you restructure a database table, you need to have exclusive access. Was BiblioWeb shut down?
Alright, I tried to edit the
Alright, I tried to edit the keyword field length again with Biblioweb turned off. It seemed to work: it said that the database was updated.
However, when I checked back on the Biblioweb Look-up Page Keyword lists, the keywords were still only displayed out to the 30th character.
What should I try next?
Ben Marx
You can run Biblioscape and
You can run Biblioscape and go to "File | Database | Update Lookup Index".
Thanks Paul. That worked
Thanks Paul. That worked great.
Ben Marx