Problem with the Innovative AVS (Alta Vista) keyword search

[Brewer, Michael]

All, 

 

If you have an Innovative catalog at your library, please read this message.
If you are not sure if you have an Innovative system, check with your Slavic
or other librarian (and please forward them this message as well).
Innovative also goes by "triple i" or Innopac.

 

Innovative's AVS (Alta Vista) keyword search is unable to find as many has
half of the keywords you may enter, if you are searching for a Russian (or
other transliterated language) resource.  They feel this is not a problem
and, as far as I have been told, have no plans to fix it.  They need to hear
from as many users as possible that this is a serious problem. 

 

In short, any word that uses more than one diacritic in it in the
bibliographic record cannot be found by the AVS search.  It should be
stressed that this is the case whether or not you insert the numbers within
brackets that represent the diacritical marks. It should also be stressed
that this impacts on not only Russian and other Cyrillic script languages,
but ANY languages that us diacritics (either as part of their alphabet, or
as part of their transliteration in library records).  It affects languages
such as French, German, or Spanish less only because they rarely use more
than one (different) diacritic in a word.  In Russian, however, any word
with a ia/я, a iu/ю, or a ts/ц will not be found using this search (each of
these requires 2 diacritics).  Likewise, any word that uses any combination
of 2 or more of the many other diacritics will also not be found.

 

Because our users more and more go to the keyword search first (or it is
offered to them as a first choice), and because cataloging for foreign
languages records tends to be less reliable (often leading the researcher to
fall back on the use of the keyword search so as not to miss incorrectly, or
minimally cataloged works), this is a very important issue. 

 

If you are not sure if your system uses the AVS keyword search, simply type
in something like "chetvertaia" or "iunost," or "tsirk" or any other word
including ts, ia, or iu, and liable only to come up in a Russian record
(since if the word is from another language source, and has already been
transliterated on that source - for example, "Images of America in
Aleksandrov's Tsirk" - then it will be found by the system, as the
diacritical marks will not have been entered as numbers within brackets
within the bibliographic record).

 

Please send a message to info at iii.com <mailto:info at iii.com>  to voice your
concern (or outrage) over how this problem with Innovative software affects
access to non-English resources by scholars and students. 

 

Thanks, 

 

Michael Brewer

German & Slavic Studies Librarian

University of Arizona Library, A210

1510 E. University

P.O. Box 210055

Tucson, AZ 85721-0055

Fax 520.621.9733

Voice 520.621.9919

brewerm at u.library.arizona.edu

 

Ps.  I am attaching the relevant paragraphs of a response our library got
from Innovative about this problem.  

 

I am writing in regards to [your] call, wherein you reported:

 

" ... Dvorak pasted into the keyword search entry box works correctly and 

finds all entries that used the diacritic.  Firkusny pasted into the 

keyword search entry box gets a NO ENTRIES  FOUND response.  There are 11 

entries in the database with Firkusny.  Why doesn't this search work like 

the Dvorak search?"

 

In AVS, a search with diacritic(s) will retrieve only those records 

containing that diacritic.  However, for "Firkusny" the 11 records you 

mentioned are actually coded as:

 

Firku{233}sn{226}y

 

In order for these records to be retrieved, the search string used should 

have *all* diacritics or *no* diacritics at all.  Per documentation in 

CSDirect:

 

http://csdirect.iii.com/faq/adv_sch.shtml#special_chars
<http://csdirect.iii.com/faq/adv_sch.shtml#special_chars> 

 

" ... Generally, the AltaVista software indexes words containing diacritics 

both with and without the diacritics ... "

 

In a word that has more than one diacritic, AVS will not index for each 

instance of a diacritic on the word (i.e. it will not index for 

"Firkusn{226}y" and "Firku{233}sny").  I hope this answers your 

question.  I will close the call at this point but do contact us at the 

Help Desk if you have questions.

 

Sincerely,

Carmel

 

 

----------------------------------------------------------------

Carmel Asubar                           800-878-6600 (USA/Canada)

Systems Librarian                       510-655-6200

Customer Services Department            510-450-6350 (Fax)

Innovative Interfaces Inc.

5850 Shellmound Way                     casubar at iii.com

Emeryville,  CA  94608                  www.iii.com

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