Search using facets and-or search box

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
2 min read





The University of Hull's approach to discovery within the institutional repository is little different to the basic Blacklight approach, although we have made some refinements. The links are to wireframe mockups of the key pages drawn with a wonderful piece of software - Balsamiq Mockups.

Home page

  • Nothing special here except the icons to launch popular searches. In practice the icons displayed are different depending on whether you are a member of the public, a university student or a member of staff. Note the option to use Blacklight's 'Advanced search' module and the removal of the dropdown to limit the standard search. Our users expect their search boxes to take the Google 'search everything in sight' approach by default. In our case this will also include a full-text search (though not in Phase 1 of our implementation).

Search return

  • Again fairly standard but note that on this screen we have the option to 'search within these results'. If this box is not checked, a new full search results. Each search result has an icon beside it to indicate the nature of the resource (normal text, presentation, multimedia etc) and in the case of a still image this icon is, in fact, a thumbnail.

Basic splash page

  • This is the page that perhaps differs most from the equivalent in our current repository. We have re-ordered the fields so that the essential information is visible on a netbook screen without scrolling and we have moved the download links from the bottom of the page to the side - again so that they are obvious on a limited-depth screen. The QR code is wishful thinking in Phase 1.

Extended splash page

  • This is the same page but with the 'Show additional resources' panel opened. This gives the specialist user access to all the original descriptive metadata - normally MODS. For electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) the basic metadata is a UK specialisation 'UKETD_DC' and MODS, if requested, is derived from it on the fly. In all cases a request for DC is an on-the-fly conversion from the MODS (yes even if that has just been magically created from the UKETD_DC!).

Image splash page

  • This is the basic splash page again but just showing that we put a thumbnail in with the description for images. Note also that 'author' has become 'creator' and 'abstract' has become 'description'; the field names are genre-sensitive