[Note: I’ve since made a better explanation of, and solution for, this problem.] Here at UMich, we’re apparently in the minority in that we have Mirlyn, our catalog discovery interface (a very hacked version of VuFind), set up to find records that match only a subset of the query terms. Put more succinctly: everyone else seem to join all terms with ‘AND’, whereas we do a DisMax variant on ‘OR’. Now, I’m actually quite proud of how our searching behaves. Reference desk anecdotes and our statistics all point to the idea that people tend to find what they’re looking for.…
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2010-08-18 / Bill Dueber