First look: Browse

Today we take a closer look at the browse-function of the BHL-Europe portal. This function is especially useful for those who are not sure what they are searching for or who want to scan the content available in the portal. It allows users to scroll through results from the five most used search categories: Title, Author, Journal title, Year and Content provider.

Overview of the Browse-function

The functions Browse by Title, Author and Journal title are linked to a Roman alphabet keypad.  With these categories, browsing automatically finds results where the selected letters are the first letters in the authors’ names and the first indexed title or journal title word listed.

Browse by year

The “browse by year” option consists of two parts. The top part is represented by a time line where users can define the start and end of the time period. If the period is less or equal to one hundred years, the “use the interval” button on the right lets users search within this particular time period.  If the range is larger than one hundred years, the button is inactive to avoid getting a large set of results. The second part consists of decade buttons. Here the time line in the top part generates decade buttons for each decade. The timeline points are also by decade. The timeline only generates decade buttons where content is available. The browse by year option gives the user several options to define a decade or range of years.

Browse by year

Browse by content provider 

This option shows the abbreviations of the content provider institutions and allows the user to search the content provided by a specific content provider.

The result list appears after you do any browse option. The words in the titles or authors metadata fields are highlighted according to the browse parameter. This shows the user how the exact content is related to the browse and displayed in the result list. The user can further refine the results using the facet list. When they start using the facet list, the search system in the background automatically switches into the advanced search option and by editing the search the user can adapt the specific search options. If users do not use the facet list, clicking on the edit search will make the Browse option appear so that users can continue browsing.

Browse by author with the edit function

This is a review of the functions used to obtain results and order results lists.  In the next development news, we will look at the content itself in the bibliographic page and content viewer.