I am a regular user of Fairfax County Libraries and their online catalog search. I am perplexed by the sub-standard performance of the search. I find that if I don't know a full title or author name that it's nearly impossible to get a match, but using the same information on Amazon, I rarely have the same amount of trouble.

For instance, if I know a couple of words in a title and plug them in the search engine, it'll usually give me a long list of titles most of which don't have any of those words anywhere in the title! The preference apparently is to list the most recent publications, first, but no one can tell me why so many books that seem unrelated to my request appear in the list.

I have tried asking them to update and improve the search, but have repeatedly been told that Fairfax County library users want to see the most recent book so they want it to work this way.

Given that my tax dollars are funding this Sirsi system. I'm curious: any FFU users go to the library or use their online card catalog? (Thought not.)

For that one person out there who uses the system, is this the way you expect it to work?

Yeah, I've noticed that too, the online search sucks to the point that it's useless.

For example: Search for the word or phrase "Fairfax".

The first search result is "To Kill A Mockingbird". The second result is "Make Way for Ducklings" (lol), and the third is some Sesame Street video.

Run an author search for the term "Clancy", and the top result is a book about someone's mother.

Something's always been screwy with that system.

I..........am Kaiser Sirsi

they need to switch over to a google powered search. google does a good job.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

Gravis Wrote:
>>> they need to switch over to a google powered search. google does a good job.


Haha. I just used the catalog to search for the word "Google". The first hit was a book about ancient Rome.

There's something really wrong there!

I open a page on Barnes and Noble, bnbn.com - find the book I want. I then cut the ISBN number and use it either to search the library or half.com. Bingo - exact match every time.

I tried it a couple or three years ago, and was unable to search for
books about computers, because all those kinds of search terms brought
up any book that had been entered into some kind of digital collection.
(I don't remember if that meant the book had been scanned, or what.)
Zillions of titles came up because the term "computer" or "digital"
had been attached to the catalog entries in some inextricable way.

I was trying to find old books about computer programming and such
from the 60s and 70s; wanted to see what was still in their collection.

I asked the librarians for help, and they were worse than useless.

One librarian seemed to mostly understand my problem and said there
was no way to search for books about computers because of the way
they had indexed all the titles in the system.

Another librarian suggested that maybe I didn't have good computer
skills and sat down at the terminal to help me. This one was perplexed,
and started with "OK... let's see...we're in a browser...ummm.. so I
click on [searching frantically around]...this...and ...um...[lost]...
ok...this is the search page!" and he seemed to have trouble understanding
how to use a mouse or what anything on the screen meant. After giving him
some basic computer usage tutorial, and showing him my query inputs and how
the results were unsatisfactory, after about 20 minutes I ran out of time.
He had apparently never seen the online catalog before and was unable to help.
I am not sure he had ever seen a computer before, for that matter.
Apparently he figured my problem must be that I didn't know how to
use one, either.

I hadn't been in the FCPL for 20 years before that, living elsewhere.
Back in the 60s and 70s I thought they were great. Someone living
here told me they had no money for library staff or anything anymore.

Did they upgrade the system recently?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2008 01:10PM by Spacy.

yeah they upgraded

they donated the old ones to bowlamerica, who uses'em for keeping scores


for now, they're using the pre-crime system


theyre trying to switch over to surface

When you find a problem using the system, send them a comment (the comment link is at the upper right) and describe the problem. It can be sort of fun (but very frustrating) to read their excuses for why their system works as designed.

It's ridiculous to have to locate ISBN numbers using a different site and search engine. Remember, they're using our tax dollars to fund this, so let them know when it needs improvement.

Spacy - I've been told that using the advanced search you can reverse the search list to display oldest to newest. That's silly if you've got more than 100 hits, but it might help if you're looking that far back. Also, sometimes the catalog browse can be more effective for any kind of search - it still isn't perfect, but it's better. It's sort of fun to browse the catalog because then you can see all the database errors and dupes.

The search does suck. So does the regular Fairfax County website's search. I understand that the County recently purchased a Google search appliance. Maybe the library will benefit from this also.

Radiophile's suggestion of the ISBN search is what I've been doing too...