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Most of our questions are still quite open ended, and honestly we are just getting started down this road. But as digital collections grow, and library budgets realign or shrink, it becomes increasingly important to back up our assertions and opinions with numbers, and find more efficient ways to work with the resources we have.
==A Different Kind of Search: Query Analysis of Map Search==
* Zoe Chao, University of New Mexico (zoechao@unm.edu)
* No previous Code4Lib presentation
Map searches are an increasingly important part of university and library websites. In 2012, The University of New Mexico (UNM) replaced its original PDF based campus maps (http://iss.unm.edu/PCD/campus-map.html) with an interactive map search based on the free Google Maps API. In addition to the basic map information such as streets and building outlines, we added search capabilities and categories for browsing (http://search.unm.edu/maps/). From November 2012 to September 2013, we logged about six thousand search instances on the campus map search. This data suggests that map searching presents a fundamentally different kind of search for users which results in a large number of failed searches that return empty or misleading result sets.
In this presentation we will briefly describe the development and current implementation of the UNM map search and our data collection of search queries. We then discuss the some surprising findings based on the data analysis. For instance, a large number of map queries include specific room numbers, which indicates some users perceive the search to include buildings' floor plans. This result suggests that we need to truncate numbers from queries in order to return correct building locations. Finally we will talk about the insight we gained from the data and our next steps toward the data driven interface design.
==More Like This: Approaches to Recommending Related Items using Subject Headings==
