[Koha] Improving Search Results

[Coehoorn, Joel]

I support a relatively new Koha installation, and the search quality we've
experienced has been exceptionally poor. What can I do to improve search
quality?

Here's an example I received today from a librarian:

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On 4/21/14 I cataloged *The Word of Promise from Jesus: Dramatic Passages
from the Gospels*. Jim Caviezel was listed as an author since he wrote the
foreword. It was given two barcodes since the book also contained a CD.
The barcodes are 212580 for the book and 212581 for the CD.

L____ had a request from Interlibrary loan for this title. We searched KOHA
every way we could think to pull this title up and continued to get a
message that "nothing was found".

I went to World Cat and found the title with the indication that it was
available at York College. In desperation, I checked the basic LC call
number and found BT 306. I had L_____ go search the BT 306 section of the
shelves and he found the book!

Then after finding the book and having the barcode number, I tried to pull
the book up by searching for the barcode number. Again, "nothing found".

As a last resort, I went into the Reports area of KOHA and searched for the
barcode number. Guess what! The Reports area found it. I clicked on the
Biblio number and up came the record. Now the record was in there! Why
wouldn't it come up when we searched for it?

Another example.

Dr. E____ asked me to order the 2014 Award winning books. I found
the list and checked KOHA for each title to confirm that we didn't have a
copy in the library. A couple of the books seemed familiar, but all I got
was "not found". I prepared the requisition and ordered the titles.

Well, the books came in last Friday. Tuesday I cataloged them. When I
downloaded the cataloging from OCLC into KOHA, two of the titles didn't go
in because they were duplicates!! I went back and tried to pull them up in
KOHA and guess what! They came up. So this caused us to have 2 copies of
these two titles. Fortunately it didn't cost more than $20 to get these
titles, but KOHA needs to be working correctly so this doesn't happen again.

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The point of this is that, from our librarians perspective, without a
better search experience, Koha is "broken".

Those are their words, not mine. Here's the thing: when I run a search in
Koha, I do get back lots of results from our catalog that are highly
relevant to the search terms. But these are exact title matches, and they
come back with "Not found".

How can I improve this?


  Joel Coehoorn
Director of Information Technology
York College, Nebraska
402.363.5603
*jcoehoorn at york.edu <jcoehoorn at york.edu>*




The mission of York College is to transform lives through
Christ-centered education and to equip students for lifelong service to
God, family, and society