Some comments on the LINGUIST service provider

[Steven Bird]

One of the workshop preparatory tasks is:

> 3. Review: choose three participating archives besides your own and
>    suggest improvements to their use of metadata; review the
>    www.language-archives.org site and the www.linguistlist.org/olac/
>    service and suggest improvements.

I have three low-level comments on the LINGUIST service provider.  I hope
this feedback will make the service even better than it already is...

a) The first page you come to is a long document with a search form some
way down.

I'd favor a very simple page (cf www.google.com) consisting of a search
box, a link to the advanced search, and a link to "more about OLAC" which
has all the original text.

b) Users wanting "more powerful search" are directed to the "OLAC Query
page".  (Weren't we just on an OLAC query page?)  Arriving on this new page,
we see that it is called "OLAC Query Form: Simple Search".  This is
confusing, since we've just come from a simple search page expecting the
more powerful search page, only to find that this is still only simple
search.  There's no pointer back to the really simple search.

I'd prefer this to be called "Advanced Search" (both on the title and the
incoming link), with a backpointer to the simple search.

c) This second page points to yet another page, called Advanced Search.
However, this generates an error: "ODBC Error Code = S1000 (General error)
[TCX][MyODBC]Table 'OLAC.alltypes' doesn't exist".  I expect this really
advanced search permits search on all fields.

I'm not convinced we need three levels of search.  Could the second and
third levels be collapsed into a single level, containing all the search
fields?

Does anyone else have comments on this service?

-Steven

--
Steven Bird        Email: <sb at cs.mu.oz.au>  Web: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~sb/
A/Prof, Dept of Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Vic 3010, AUSTRALIA
Senior Research Assoc, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania