Limit by extent in physical description

[Benjamin Kalish]

I’m creating a topic here before submitting an idea or a launchpad ticket because this is sufficiently far removed from anything we have now and I think it would benefit from some discussion to figure out exactly what we want.

This came up in a discussion with colleague where we realized that we often get reader’s advisory requests with limitations on extent:

1. Nothing above 400 pages please!
2. I’m looking for an audiobook that will take about 6 hours to listen to”
3. I’m traveling and need something good to read that won’t take up too much space in my carry on.

Currently we come up with lots of possible titles, then look at the physical description for each title and eliminate those that don’t match. It would be so much better if we could search.

[Benjamin Kalish]

I imagine this as a (possibly repeatable) line on the advanced search page.

Here’s a mockup (without it being repeatable, for simplicity):

The first drop down has options of “Is”, “Less than”, “Greater than” and “Between” while the second drop down has options of “Pages”, “Minutes”, and “Inches”.

[Elizabeth Thomsen]

This would definitely be useful, and would be simple if records were structured so that the number of pages for books, listening time for audiobooks, etc., were in their own little box that could be treated like the numbers they are. The data is in the record in fairly predictable patterns — books generally have something like 360 p. or 360 pages in 300$a but sometimes have things like viii, 371 p., [8] p. of plates, a little harder to parse out. Audiobooks sometimes have the duration listed like this 14 audio discs (17 1/2 hr.) but sometimes like this10 sound discs (ca. 72 min. each) (at least in our database.) It’s possible the data could be found and formatted, but this sounds complicated (and therefore expensive.) I definitely support the concept, though, and would love it if someone could make this work! (It’s not something I’ve seen in other library catalogs.)

In EBSCO’s NoveList Plus products, you can limit by number of pages or running time in Advanced Search, but that’s presumably because their data is structured differently. For libraries using NoveList, this can be a good way to create lists of adult biographies and memoirs recommended for young adults and less than 300 pages long, but our librarians and patrons would definitely like to be able to just do this on the fly in search!

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by Elizabeth Thomsen.

[Benjamin Kalish]

Yes, it’s not an easy problem! Perhaps an approach like follows might make sense:

• Create new fields (to store these values)
• For all existing records, and for each new record, as it is entered, do some text analysis to populate the extent fields whenever the physical description fits one of a number of predictable patterns
• allow library staff to update these fields in case the automatic procedure can’t identify the extent or gets it wrong

I think that automatic procedure could be made to get it right in a lot of cases. And I am certainly fine with the information being missing from some records. Having it on most records would be more than worth it.

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