Weighting specific collections lower

[Tom Misilo]

Hello,

We are currently running 2.6, and were looking to see if anyone has a solution for this request. We want to limit the children results from coming up in the staff search (it isn't a public collection).

Ideally I would like to have the results from that collections (since there are over 2000!) suppressed and not come up in searches. It would be nice if only the Collection level description would appear if searched for (Vertical Files) and then if staff were searching for something in particular in the Vertical Files they could (hopefully) still search the collection itself with the Quick Search function found on the left hand side of Finding Aids. 

Thanks!

[Dan Gillean]

Hi Tom, 

A few ideas that may in combination get you where you want:

First, if you navigate to Browse > Archival descriptions, and then open the Advanced search panel and input your search there, then by default the "Top level descriptions" filter is in place in panel, and will be applied when you do your search... or alternatively, once you do a search from the global search box, you can then refine the results to limit them to only top-level descriptions by opening the Advanced search panel, applying that "top level" filter, and then submitting it. Basically, by default: 

• Browsing has the "top-level descriptions" filter applied
• Searching does not (i.e shows all descriptions

But wherever you start from, they are the same page with different filters applied, so you can always update the filters and resubmit. 

Second - if you actually want a search box that defaults to returning top-level description results for searches, but WITHOUT having to fork AtoM, customize the code, and then maintain it, there is a way you could do so via AtoM's static pages! See slides 33-37 of this deck: 

• https://www.slideshare.net/accesstomemory/things-i-wish-id-known-atom-tips-tricks-and-gotchas
  

This provides a code snippet example of how you can add your own working search box to a static page, including one example of customizing it. Here's the unstyled version of the code snippet: 

<form action="/informationobject/browse" data-autocomplete="/search/autocomplete" autocomplete="off"><input type="hidden" name="topLod" value="0"/><input type="text" name="query" value="" placeholder="Search our holdings"/><button class="btn btn-default btn-block">Search</button></form>

A couple things to note. First, if you use this, then keep it as a one-liner like this. Because AtoM static pages have a number of different helpers for formatting (for example, properly formatting Markdown, etc) and these can sometimes conflict, it turns out that properly spacing, linebreaking, indenting your HTML in a static page can mean that it may not work as expected. 

More importantly, note that I have highlighted two parameters, a name (topLod) and a value (0). If you change the value to 1 instead, then this custom search box will apply the top level description filter. Essentially, all atom search parameters are passed in the URL, and topLod=1 is what you will see as part of a URL when the top-level descriptions filter is in place. By default the snippet above will, when used, take a user to a results page showing matches across ALL levels of description - but if you change that 0 to a 1, then you're setting the top-level filter. 

Remember, if you don't want to do this on your homepage or an easy to find public static page, you can make more static pages as needed. See: 

• https://www.accesstomemory.org/docs/2.6/user-manual/administer/static-pages
  

New static pages only show up in the Quick Links menu if you manually add them (see Manage Menus) so if you wanted to create a collections-search page or similar with a customized search box on it for staff, you could - they would have to know the URL if you don't link it anywhere. Of course, that's likely over-engineering, considering they can just use the existing filter in Advanced search, but you've got options! 

Finally, when it does come time for staff to search in your large collections, perhaps the tips in slides 15-20 of the same deck linked above will help a bit! 

Cheers, 

Dan Gillean, MAS, MLIS
AtoM Program Manager
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

@accesstomemory

he / him

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