Response: Spotlight on BIDS

Jan Cropper responds to Clives reponse.
There is a response from Clive to the response below.

Clive, in his response to Isobel's Spotlight on BIDS, suggests that '...the fact that html forms make it much easier to specify searches which apply to several different field simultaneously ... may mean that the facility to recycle sets is not so important.'

In the olden days when the likes of me were taught to construct search strategies, one of the main principles we learnt was to break down the subject of the search into its constituent parts, enter each part as a separate statement then use the building block approach to combine the sets to achieve the completed search.

Despite today's more sophisticated and/or user friendly interfaces the principle still holds. Clive's example "find me refs which have fruit flies in the title AND are written by jones OR by bloggs" is fine as far as it goes. But what happens if the searcher mis-keys 'flies' as 'files'? The search produces no results and the user assumes nothing has been written. Split the search into separate steps, receive a null response to the 'fruit flies/files' section and even the most uncritical user may suspect a problem.

When viewing the refs, the user notices the term 'drosophila' and wants to include it. Given the choice of searching on that term alone and combining the result with that of the first compilation or keying in (with correct syntax!) "find me... fruit flies OR drosophila in the title AND written by jones OR written by bloggs", I know which I'd go for.

So sorry, Clive, but for once I have to disagree. It had to happen one day :-)

Jan Cropper,
Automation Librarian,
UCL Library

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