There's been some talk here about improving the searching code. It seems to me that a lot can be done by improving the user interface. Currently, the internal and OPAC search pages have three types of searches, but this isn't obvious. There's the search by bar code, which returns information about a specific item. There's the "fuzzy" search by author, title, etc. which searches for a combination of criteria. There's the subject search, which searches for known subjects, not books. On the internal search page, the barcode search is visually distinct from the other searches, so it's intuitively obvious that they're two different types of searches and should return different results. On the OPAC page, however, all of the fields are grouped together, giving the impression that it's just one tyep of search. If you see Author: _________________ Title: _________________ [Search] you naturally assume that you can fill in "Asimov" and "Astronomy", and get books with "Asimov" as the author AND "astronomy" in the title. Therefore, you conclude, if you see Author: _________________ Title: _________________ Subject: _________________ [Search] you can fill in "Asimov" as the author and "astronomy" as the subject, and get all the books written by Asimov on the subject of astronomy. This isn't what the page does: it ignores the author entirely, and displays a list of subjects that have the word "astronomy" in them. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to combine the barcode with anything else, such as an author. The barcode uniquely identifies a book, so either the author will match and return the same result as the barcode alone, or it won't and the search will return nothing. Finally, there's only one "OK Start Search" button on the page, which reinforces the impression that everything is part of one big search. This is true, actually: there's only one <form> block on the search page, and the code in C4/Search.pm jumps through all sorts of hoops to see which fields were specified and which ones weren't, and try to guess from that what kind of search the user wants to perform. IMHO it'd be better to start by changing the page layout: Keywords: ________________ Author: ________________ Title: ________________ (*) Normal ( ) Exact Series: ________________ (*) Normal ( ) Exact Illustrator: _____________ Subject: ________________ Item type: [Choose an item type] [Search] -------- Subject: ________________ [Search] -------- Barcode: ________________ [Search] (And maybe drop the Dewey search. I don't know.) For the first search, all of the terms would be combined: the search would return all books that match all of the criteria. The second search would return a list of subjects, the way it's currently done. The third search would find a specific book, as you'd expect. This layout seems more intuitive to me. (The in-store search thingy at Borders has a different interface: a pull-down selection box allows you to choose whether you want to search by author, title, or keyword. But I think the above is better, since it allows you to narrow the search by providing more terms.) The underlying HTML would then contain three <form> blocks. Each one could then include a field like <input type="hidden" name="type" value="by-barcode"> which would take the guesswork out of the code that actually performs the search and make it easier to Do The Right Thing. Thoughts? Opinions? Dissent? -- Andrew Arensburger This message *does* represent the arensb@ooblick.com views of ooblick.com A running program is the moment of truth. All else is either prophecy or nostalgia.