Frank A. Roos felt an urge to reveal at 3:46 AM -0500 on 1997-10-02:
> TYPE=map AND COVERAGE="1990-1997" AND DESCRIPTION=Melbourne
Melbourne is a geographic location; it should, technically, fall under
"Coverage" instead of "Description", right?
This is certainly a search that makes sense to anyone familliar to DC, but
not to anyone unfamilliar to it. There should be some way that search
engines first examine the syntax of the search itself, including
recognizing non-standard dates and translating them. This search should
work, even though it is not as specific:
transcript news Jan 23, 1961
should translate somehow to
TYPE=text-transcript AND COVERAGE="1961-01-23" AND SUBJECT="current events"
Does anyone know if this is possible? Or will people wanting to use the
new DC for searches have to learn the syntax as well? If so, I forsee a
much smaller group of people interested in using them. Certainly, another
option is to include a lot of fields with each of the fields pointing to a
DC element. They would also have to be clearly defined (probably on a
"Search Help" page):
Search using one or more of these terms:
________
Keywords:|______| [this would search in Title/Subject, perhaps]
_________________________________________
Type of Resource: |_pop-up menu, containing resource types_|
____________
Date of Resource: |__________|
And so on. Resource types, incidentally, should be listed in alphabetical
order, not ordered hiearchally--the menu list will be a lot clearer for
searchers if it reads "book,email,video,webpage" rather than
"text.manuscript,text.correspondence.email,video,text.webpage".
I don't know who amongst the list is working on developing a search
"paradigm" but I hope you take my suggestions under consideration.
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[ Jordan Reiter ]
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[ "Don't you realize that intellectual people ]
[ are all ignorant because they can't spray ]
[ paint that small?" ]
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