"Smart Catalog" coming to Fort Wayne

One of the Midwest's premier research destinations will roll out a new on-line catalog system this Thursday! See the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's video on their blog.

On first viewing of the video, I'm excited about having a visible search trail and alerts via RSS feeds. I'm hopeful that this new system will make it possible to unify the Genealogy Center's microtext catalog with the main catalog in searching -- and that it will make it easier to figure out the proper configuration of words for subject searches, especially geographical ones. And I hope that the ability to view books title by title as they appear on the physical shelves will be preserved.

Weekend Warriors Michigan's Death Search

The much-publicized rollout of Michigan death records 1897-1920 quickly led to server overload -- now apparently fixed -- but the defective nature of the search engine offered has been much less noted, if at all. (I am a big fan of Seeking Michigan.org and blogged about its Civil War archives back on March 5.)

When I attempt a simple search in quotation marks for "Floyd Glover" I get a very long list of people who have Floyd in their first names with no Glover and Glover in their names with no Floyd. So I move on to advanced search, which looks like a really powerful setup.

In advanced search, you first need to moved "Death Records 1897-1920" from the lower left-hand box to the right-hand box, so as to be searching only this one collection. (As you attempt a search and then move back to this screen, you'll have to move it back again -- don't forget!) Then you can turn your attention to the four interconnected search boxes. On the left-hand side of each box you can choose search mode: all of the words, the exact phrase, any of the words, or none of the words. On the right-hand side of each line you can choose your search term. In addition to 16 generic search terms usable in all the Seeking Michigan collections, you can search for first name of deceased, last name of deceased, city/village/town, county, death year, birth year, age, father's last name, or father's given name.

A simple test will show the problems with this seemingly powerful array of search tools. Say you want to browse the death records of Clinton County, and put "Clinton" in as the search term, and "county" as the search field. Result: a long list of results starting with people with "Clinton" as their first name! The exact same list of results appears for any search mode except of course "none of the words."

Using "1899" as search term with "death year" as search field produces a list of people with 1899 as either birth or death year.

The end result of this impressive array of search engines is that the only people I could find were my Mitzelfeld/Mitzelfeldt relatives by marriage, because their name is so rare.

I trust that the Michigan folks can take this back to their contractor and get the search interface to measure up to its tremendous potential. Right now it's an inferior browsing tool.