It’s been just over a year since we launched our new catalog in January of 2019. Since then we’ve made improvements to features, performance, and reliability, have developed a long term governance and development strategy, and have plans for future features and enhancements.
During the Spring 2019 semester we experienced a number of outages of the Solr index that powers the new catalog. It proved to be both frustrating and difficult to track down the root cause of the outages. We took a number of measures to reduce the risk of bot traffic slowing down or crashing the index. A few of these measures include limiting facet paging to 50 pages and results paging to 250 pages, as well as setting limits on OpenSearch queries. We also added service monitoring so we are automatically alerted when things go awry and automatic restarts under some known bad system conditions. We also identified that a bug in the version of Solr we were running was vulnerable to causing crashes for queries with particular characteristics. We have since applied a patch to Solr to address this bug. Happily, the index has not crashed since we implemented these protective measures and bug fixes.
Over the past year we’ve made a number of other improvements to the catalog including:
- Caching of the home page and advanced search page have reduced page load times by 75%.
- Subject searches are now more precise and do not include stemmed terms.
- CDs and DVDs can be searched by accession number.
- When digitized copies of Duke material are available at the Internet Archive, links to the digital copy are automatically generated.
- Records can be saved to a bookmarks list and shared with others via a stable URL.
- Eligible records now have a “Request digitization” link.
- Many other small improvements and bug fixes.
We sometimes get requests for features that the catalog already supports:
- Queries with Boolean operators
- Queries with wildcards
- Searching across multiple libraries at the same time (from advanced search)
- Anchor links for quick access to record metadata, and a jump to top link.
While development has slowed, the core TRLN team meets monthly to discuss and prioritize new features and fixes, and dedicates time each month to maintenance and new development. We have a number of small improvements and bug fixes in the works. One new feature we’re working on is adding a citation generator that will provide copyable citations in multiple formats (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and Turabian) for records with OCLC numbers.
We welcome, read, and respond to all feedback and feature requests that come to us through the catalog’s feedback form. Let us know what you think.
Check out “Search Tips” and “Expert Search Tips” for detailed information about how to get the most out of the new catalog.
Great, thank you
thanks for summarizing this, cory. we should have had a birthday party!