What do you find when you turn on one of the computers in Bass Library? As of this semester, not Orbis, but Yufind.
Yufind — an experimental alternative to the Orbis library catalog — is now displayed on the Library Web site and as the default home page for some computers in Bass Library, and the third beta version is expected to launch as early as this week.
Part of a larger library effort to evaluate Orbis, the new search engine is intended to be more intuitive than Orbis, which library administrators said delivers precise results but is also less user-friendly. In the future, Yufind will include enhancements like increased filtering abilities and searches in non-Latin alphabets, such as Hindi and simple Chinese characters.
“One of the main problems we found people having [with Orbis] was getting zero results on their searches,” Scott Matheson, the Library’s Web manager, said. “That’s not a good thing when we have 12 million items to be looking through.”
In contrast with Orbis — which was introduced in its current form in 2002 and only delivers results that match the exact phrasing of the query — Yufind is more flexible with queries and is more forgiving of user error. It gives people more results, Matheson said, providing users with what former project manager Daniel Lovins called a “Google-like experience.”
FreePint Shop:
VIP LiveWire:
