* The CSV files appear to be valid (yay) – the Ruby FasterCSV library (which is apparently fairly strict) didn’t seem to choke on them at all.
* If you’re importing them as UTF-8, there seem to be some illegal characters (which caused me an issue when importing into a PostGres database). I passed them through the Iconv conversion library to convert them to valid UTF-8.
* The occasional field is really long, so if you set up your database using string (VARCHAR) fields you may end up either truncating them or hitting errors (depending on your DB behaviour). I ended up switching to ‘text’ fields for all the fields apart from collection and ‘whole_part’.
* The name is often blank, and the title is often blank, so you can’t rely on either being present in your views. I wrote a quick helper which displays title if present, otherwise name. There are also a small number of fields with neither a name nor a title! In these cases, you may want to show a truncated form of the description.
* I didn’t find any duplicate object_ids, but I didn’t enforce this uniqueness in the database either (just in case).

Frankie

‘Advanced search’ is a such a juicy question – I suspect there’s an audience for it somewhere, but it would very much depend on the collection and type of searcher. Or maybe there’s no audience for advanced search…

I saw a demo of http://sig.ma/ yesterday – I don’t have my notes here, but I think that was the one that was exploring ‘fuzzy browsing’, which sounded like something to explore for faceted browsing.

Questions I’m interested in:

- The “how” of searches – how do people iterate collection searches? Do they try adding or removing keywords? Do they use the facets we present to browse? Do they find dead-ends (0 results) even when we warn them? Do they type in artist names even though we have a separate field for that? Are they trying to use us like google? Do they sort by date?
- Very much related: what counts as a successful search? When they stop searching for a while after clicking on something? Just opening an object detail page? Collecting / tagging / commenting on something?
- And also, the overlap between search and browse, and the bugaboo of “Advanced Search”. I am now firmly anti-Advanced Search, but it’s hard to summarize. I think a good browse with a keyword field is really the holy grail of collection exploration (keyword is just another facet!), but I’m not sure we got it right. Any stats / input / ideas on this would be appreciated.

Can’t wait to see what else comes in!