ORCA Catalog Design Task Force
Final Report

Introduction

• Design a Web interface for the ORCA catalog
• Configure the keyword index for the ORCA catalog

The CDTF consists of seven members, three each from Orbis and Cascade libraries plus a representative from the ORCA consortium. Three of the library representatives are catalogers, and three are systems librarians.

This report summarizes the recommendations of the task force. The following information may also be of interest:

• ORCA Web catalog pages, http://www.ohsu.edu/library/ORCA
• Sample ORCA results screens, http://www.ohsu.edu/library/ORCA/sample_results_pages/
• CDTF Web site, http://oldlib.uoregon.edu/orca/CDTFindex.html, featuring the complete charge, along with agendas, minutes of CDTF meetings and background material

ORCA Catalog Design

Introduction
After considering the design of the current Orbis and Cascade catalogs, the committee elected to base the design of the ORCA catalog on the Cascade catalog, with some modifications. The ORCA catalog incorporates the colors used in Cascade, along with the basic design of the top-level page. Three colors are used--blue, green, and white. Blue buttons are used for Help/About ORCA information on the top-level page, while green buttons are used for search buttons on the top-level page. The background of all pages in the main scope is white, while pages in the journal scope have green backgrounds. Buttons on search pages and results screens use a combination of all three colors. If the ORCA logo--still to be designed--uses colors incompatible with blue, green, and white, different colors can be substituted easily. We recommend, however that individual colors coordinate with specific features as described above (search, help, journal scope, etc.), regardless of the specific ! colors chosen.

Text and examples for search and help screens were taken from both Orbis and Cascade, with additions and modifications as needed. Our governing principles were simplicity, browser compatibility, accessibility, and ease of maintenance--pages should be simple for the user to understand, display correctly on all modern Web browsers, and be accessible to disabled users, complying with all Priority 1 guidelines specified in the World-Wide Web Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. To simplify maintaining the pages, the committee recommends using cascading stylesheets to define the look and feel of elements common to several pages. Using server-side includes, if supported by INN-Reach, would also simplify maintaining the pages. Note: The sample pages created by the committee contain very simple cascading stylesheets but do not employ them fully.

The top-level page mimics the design of the top-level page in the Cascade catalog (see fig. 1, below).

Figure 1: ORCA Main Page

Search Screens
All search screens have a similar look and feel, with a row of buttons linking to various searches at the top, a search box, help text, and example searches. On all search pages other than the keyword search page, users can view all text without scrolling. The four most popular searches--Title, Keyword, Author, and Subject--are linked from the top-level page. The Subject button, unlike the other three, links to a submenu, which lists the three types of subject searches available to ORCA catalog users. The Other Searches button also links to a submenu, which includes links to less-popular searches such as call number and genre/form.

Journal Scope
Clicking on the Journals Only link on the main page takes the user to the main menu for the journal scope, which looks nearly identical to the main menu for the entire catalog, with the addition of a green background and a JOURNALS/MAGAZINES header. Search screens in the journal scope are also virtually identical to those in the entire catalog scope, except for the background and header. The background color persists wherever the user goes in the journal scope, providing a clear visual cue that the user is in the journal scope. The JOURNALS/MAGAZINES header is included on all search screens and should be added to results screens. Examples on search screens in the journal scope are tailored to journal searches where appropriate.

Results Screens
The committee did not extensively customize results screens. We created a set of buttons, and the green background will appear on results screens in the journal scope. The committee recommends that the edition be displayed above the holdings/request link in the bibliographic record. We assumed that URLs would be included in institution records, as they currently are in Orbis.

Release 2002 Phase 2 of the INN-Reach software displays institutional holdings differently from previous releases. The committee spent considerable time studying the new format. We defined WWWOption settings for column labels and width (see box, below) but elected not to specify which, if any, colors should be used in the holdings display tables. A sample page illustrating these settings is available at http://www.ohsu.edu/library/ORCA/sample_results_pages/sample_holdings.htm. Please note that these settings were not tested on a live INN-Reach system and therefore may need to be adjusted when the ORCA catalog is implemented.

Examples of all results screens may be viewed at http://www.ohsu.edu/library/ORCA/sample_results_pages/. These pages illustrate the look and feel selected by the committee, but they are not functional. Most of the links on the pages do not work.

Help Screens
The committee created a help menu and drafted text for most items on it. In general, we took help text from existing Orbis and Cascade help pages, modifying it only slightly. Hence these pages should be reviewed once the design and functionality of the ORCA catalog is finalized, to be sure that all help files accurately reflect consortium policies and catalog functionality. We did not develop text for the Visiting Other ORCA Libraries page or the About ORCA page, as we lacked sufficient knowledge about the new consortium to do so. We did create text for the Borrowing Materials from Member Libraries page, even though it is outside our scope, but we recommend that it be reviewed carefully to ensure accuracy. The Contact ORCA link points users to a Web form in which they can type a message. We chose to use a form rather than posting an email address, because spammers often harvest email addresses from Web pages.

Indexes and Indexing

The ORCA catalog should include all indexes currently in either the Orbis or Cascade catalog, except:

• do not include an author-title index
• do not include a journal title index

CDTF's charge addressed keyword indexing parameters for the ORCA catalog but did not mention other indexes in the new catalog. As we discussed keyword indexing issues, however, we discovered that our decisions on keyword indexing related to other indexes as well. This report includes indexing rules for the medical subject and genre/form indexes as well as the keyword index. In addition, we recommend that ORCA staff work to minimize the differences in phrase indexing policies to ensure that access to valuable information is not lost.

CJK vernacular fields (880 fields) are indexed in Cascade and should be indexed in ORCA in the hope that a future release of the INN-Reach Web OPAC will be able to display them. The committee further recommends that CJK display be enabled as soon as it is available in the INN-Reach software.

Phrase Indexes

Medical Subject Index
The committee recommends the following parameters for the medical subject index:

650   2		Rem |236e
600 [02]	Rem |euw2346
610 [02]	Rem |euw2346
611 [02]	Rem |uw2346
630 [02]	Rem |w2346

In addition to subject headings tagged specifically as medical (second indicator 2), these parameters also include name and uniform title headings tagged as LC (second indicator 0). If we exclude these fields, patrons who search the medical subject index for names or uniform titles will retrieve only records in which those fields are coded as medical, leading to incomplete results in some cases. Similarly, name and uniform title headings coded as medical should be included in the LC subject index. In other words, a patron should be able to search either the medical or LC subject index for a name or uniform title and see all records indexed with that name or title, regardless of how the heading is coded.

Genre/Form Index
The committee recommends that the ORCA catalog include a genre/form index with the following parameters:

655  7 REM |wz345
755    REM|23
695    KEEP ALL [local subject; see below]

In discussing parameters for this index, we discovered that Orbis and Cascade have conflicting policies with respect to loading and displaying local subject headings (69x fields). For the genre/form index only, the committee recommends including a local heading. The larger issue of including local subject headings in other subject indexes should be addressed by ORCA staff and the ORCA cataloging group.

Keyword Index

Our recommendations for the ORCA keyword index are based on the following assumptions:

• The ORCA catalog will use Innovative's Advanced Keyword Index (AVS). Because AVS is much faster than Innovative's traditional keyword index, many more fields can be indexed without reducing performance.
• Any element included in a phrase index will also be included in the keyword index, according to Innovative's standard practice.

• If a keyword search produces no hits using the implicit adjacency operator, the search should automatically re-execute using the AND operator. Searches should not further degrade to the OR operator, as the results are generally too numerous and imprecise to be useful to the searcher.
• Any field included in a Cascade phrase index will need to be added to the ORCA keyword index and should be considered for inclusion in appropriate ORCA phrase index(es)
• In general, any element included in either the Orbis or Cascade keyword index should be keyword-indexed in ORCA. Exceptions to this rule are listed in the box below.

1. Field 504 (Bibliography Note) is currently indexed in Cascade but not in Orbis. The committee was divided over whether or not to index this field. Those in favor of indexing it argued that it sometimes documents the presence of filmographies or discographies that are not mentioned elsewhere in the MARC record. Indexing this field would enable the user to locate these resources with a keyword search. Those against indexing the 504 argued that this note usually takes the standard form of "Includes bibliographical references and index" or similar and would create lots of false drops for users searching for bibliographies in the keyword index. The majority of the committee voted not to index this field. For more information on field 504, see the appropriate page of the MARC21 Concise Bibliographic Format, http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdnot1.html#mrcb504.

Conclusion

The recommendations contained in this report represent the collective wisdom of CDTF members, based on our experiences with the Orbis and Cascade INN-Reach catalogs. We realize that these recommendations may need to be adjusted as the ORCA catalog is developed. Please contact Janet Crum, CDTF Chair, or Pam Mofjeld, ORCA liaison to CDTF, for clarification of any points in this report.

Respectfully submitted,