[Koha] Title search works, but Library catalog search fails in OPAC

Fri Jun 25 09:55:46 NZST 2021

Follow-up to my problem searching the OPAC for phrases containing punctuation (i.e., Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators).  This Bywater Solutions<https://bywatersolutions.com/education/elastic-searching> article suggests that the problem is a feature of Elasticsearch.

FYI, we are using Elasticsearch 6.1.1 on its own dedicated server, and I don’t believe we’ve installed the ICU Analysis plug-in (looks like it’s required for Zebra, but I can’t tell if it’s required for Elasticsearch), which could be a factor.  I couldn’t replicate all aspects of my experience in a sandbox, although searches for phrases containing punctuation still failed in an OPAC “Library Catalog” sandbox search.  I concluded that I needed to review our configuration.

I’ve been reviewing the Koha Wiki and elastic.co documentation, and comparing to our index_config.yaml.

By chance does anyone know how to interpret the syntax below?  The documentation describes the parameters below, but I don’t see any usage of “-“ before options.  Does the option “- punctuation“ mean “yes, remove punctuation”, or “no, don’t remove punctuation”, or does the phrase refer to some additional configuration file, or perhaps it’s commented out?

      analyzer_phrase:

        tokenizer: keyword

        filter:

          - icu_folding

        char_filter:

          - punctuation

Thanks for your time and consideration,

Tasha Bales

Business Support Team | Information Services

Enterprise Services | Enterprise Operations, Finance and Sustainability

-----Original Message-----

From: Bales (US), Tasha R

Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 7:54 AM

To: 'Jonathan Druart' <jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org>

Cc: Discussion Group Koha <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>

Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Koha] Title search works, but Library catalog search fails in OPAC

Jonathan, thank you!

It does work without the parentheses.

I would suspect an encoding problem, but for that the problem only manifests in the OPAC, and not the intranet.

I came across this issue while testing after migrating from MariaDB to Percona MySQL.  Your reply prompted me to check the encoding of the new database, and it's unfortunately Latin-1.  Since these are parentheses and not diacritics, I’m not sure what my expectations should be, but changing to UTF-8 is a place to start.  Httpd.conf does have UTF-8 set as the default.

FWIW, my source records were encoded in MARC-8.  I used MarcEdit to convert them to UTF-8, and it appears that Koha automatically converts anyway on import.  When I loaded these records into Koha, I used bulkmarcimport.pl on the command line.

I'll ask that the default character set of the database be changed, and see if that helps.  Thanks again.  I'm embarrassed that I didn't think to omit the parentheses, or rather was belligerently insisting to myself that they should not have been a problem,

Tasha Bales

Business Support Team | Information Services Enterprise Services | Enterprise Operations, Finance and Sustainability

(480) 509-5415

https://is.web.boeing.com

-----Original Message-----

From: Jonathan Druart [mailto:jonathan.druart at bugs.koha-community.org]

Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2021 12:01 AM

To: Bales (US), Tasha R <tasha.r.bales at boeing.com>

Cc: Discussion Group Koha <koha at lists.katipo.co.nz>

Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Koha] Title search works, but Library catalog search fails in OPAC

Importance: High

EXT email: be mindful of links/attachments.

Hello Tasha,

I've created 2 records with

  245$a Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators as artificial muscles and the following query returns the 2 results.

/opac-search.pl?idx=&q=Electroactive%20polymer%20%28EAP%29%20actuators&weight_search=1

Tried on master and 20.11.06.

Maybe a silly idea: does it work without the parenthesis?

Could you try and recreate it on a sandbox

(https://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Sandboxes) and provide us a step by step plan to reproduce the problem?

Regards,

Jonathan

Le mar. 22 juin 2021 à 00:46, Bales (US), Tasha R <tasha.r.bales at boeing.com> a écrit :

>

> Good afternoon,

>

> I’m having trouble with Title vs. Library catalog keyword searching with several example titles.  Searching the same phrase with either method yields different results.  This problem occurs only in the OPAC.  I hope to confirm whether the behavior I’m seeing is intended (i.e., the problem is me) or not.  Thanks in advance.

>

> For example, given the ebook title, Electroactive polymer (EAP)

> actuators as artificial muscles, a Title keyword search in the OPAC is successful, but a plain, Library catalog (i.e., no index specified), keyword search fails.

>

> For reference, the title is recorded in the MARC record as:

> 245 00 - TITLE STATEMENT

>   a Title Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators as artificial muscles :

>

> Below I’ve copied in my search history as well as the tail of the search URL that shows the search parameters.

>

>

> ·         Library catalog keyword search with 0 results

>

> o   2021-06-21 02:34 PM   Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators, suppress:false  0

>

> o   …opac-search.pl?idx=&q=Electroactive%20polymer%20%28EAP%29%20actuators&weight_search=1

>

>

> ·         Title keyword search with 2 results

>

> o   2021-06-21 02:34 PM   Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators, suppress:false  2

>

> o   …opac-search.pl?idx=ti&q=Electroactive+polymer+%28EAP%29+actuators&weight_search=1

>

> As a test, I decided to enclose my Library catalog search terms in quotes, which yielded the desired results.  However, I did not at all anticipate that quotes would be required to get hits:

>

>

> ·         Library catalog quoted keyword search with 2 results

>

> o   2021-06-21 02:46 PM   "Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators", suppress:false  2

>

> o   … opac-search.pl?idx=&q=%22Electroactive+polymer+%28EAP%29+actuators%22&weight_search=1

>

> On comparing the above URL query strings, it appears that the unquoted terms in the Library catalog keyword search aren’t “anded” together with a “+” the way other searches are, but I’m not sure what the implications are, if any.  Also, the Koha manual indicates the following, which suggests to me that I ought to get hits on the unquoted string:

>

> When you have more than one word in the search box, Koha will still do a keyword search, but a bit differently. Each word will be searched on its own, then the Boolean connector ‘and’ will narrow your search to those items with all words contained in matching records.

>

> I understand and can predict pretty well the way our old ILS (Millennium, if context helps) will perform a keyword search, but I’m a little confused here.  My expectation for this particular case is that all of the above methods would yield results.  If there are any pointers to be had, I thank you if might point me to them so that I may be better poised to help users.

>

> I’m using Elasticsearch with Koha 20.11.06.  I reindexed both authorities and biblios today, but that didn’t impact my experience.  The records are not newly added.

>

> Thanks!

>

>

> Tasha Bales

> Business Support Team | Information Services Enterprise Services |

> Enterprise Operations, Finance and Sustainability

>

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