Yes, the search facility leaves a little to be desired. What about implementing 'Boolean searching' with +, - and NOT terms. The - are particularly important.
In addition to this 'Field searching' may help in the instance that Althea is talking about. Many of the libraries use this in their SPYDUS catalogue system.
ie Choose one search term, get the results, refine them using another search term etc.
'Truncation searching' or 'wild card searching' (not just at beginning or ends but in between as well) would also be a bonus, especially when papers made mistakes with spellings of peoples names, addresses etc.
It's great to have the PapersPast resource but to have to then still search through hundreds of pages of results (no exaggeration) which is the way it is at present, is mind-numbingly boring.
Oh and while we are on the topic of improvements, PapersPast indicated to me last year that you were bringing in an user editing facility similar to the National Library of Australia system, this year. Any ETA on that?
Thanks for hearing me out. I do appreciate having this thread to communicate requests and ideas directly to Paperspast - it's a breath of fresh air (especially compared to the bureaucracy of other government departments).
