The Genius of Simplicity

I’ve been dealing with a lot of dumb technology problems, lately.

The Ümlaut has uncovered stupid issues with both Voyager and SFX in the last week (Voyager’s Z39.50 server returns every record in the database if you do an ‘or’ search on the 001 and SFX’s handling of title changes is too complicated to even mention).

This simple fix makes me very happy, though.

Some backstory:

In June, I had a meeting with our Digital Initiatives department about the effect of the Ümlaut on their services, namely DSpace. I told them that it was impractical to search SMARTech (our DSpace instance) for every incoming citation, since, theoretically, SMARTech should appear in the Google/Yahoo results. When we tested the theory, our results looked like this. This is obviously ugly, but even worse, it probably discourages discovery of the items in the repository. One has to assume that people are mainly finding items via the search engines. When they see results like that, with no real indication of what they’re looking at, they will probably just move on (even if DSpace is holding the preprint to what they’re searching for).

I left the meeting and asked Dorothea Salo if she, too, had this problem and if she knew a fix for it. About 20 minutes later, she had this awesome title hack worked up. I sent it to our DSpace admin (I, thankfully, don’t deal with it directly) and now we get to bask in the glory of our new and spiffy title listing in the search engines.

Thanks, Dorothea, for doing something genius and simple that DSpace should have done years ago.