DUVAGA Search Enhancements

This week Alex rolled out several changes to the DUVAGA general search and art history search pages that should help you find the images you need. Here are a few changes you’ll see next time you log in:

(click for more detail, and see below for descriptions of changes)

1. More Accurate Searching with Multiple Terms - You may have noticed some weird results when you searched for more than one word at a time. For example, searching van Eyck in the artist field (see below) would bring up all the images by van Briggle, van de Velde, and Rembrandt van Rijn. While sometimes amusing (searching van Eyck and getting Van Morrison, etc.), this wasn’t really good. Alex has fixed this, so DUVAGA will look for images with both of the terms (“van” and “Eyck”) in the Artist field, rather than either of the terms (“van” or “Eyck”). This change affects all of the free-text fields (artist, title, subject, material, and “all fields”).
2. Ability to Search for a Term in All Fields - A feature we brought over from the general search page is the option to search “All Fields.” This will be useful if you want all images of or by a certain artist, or if you’re not sure which field something might have been cataloged in, or if you want all images with a certain word in the title, description, or subject field. Some of our images have lengthy descriptions, and this is a great way to find words in those descriptions. If you’re not finding something you think is in the system, try your search term here.
3. More Accurate Searching by Time Period - The “Time Period” field has been a little problematic in the past, because this field was connected to the artist’s life or activity dates, and not to the actual work. Thanks to a lot of work on the parts of the VMC grad students, we’re adding more accurate information to each image record, and you can now search by dates more reliably by selecting a date range from this drop-down menu. Find images by millenium for BCE dates, centuries for CE dates, plus decades for 19th, 20th, and 21st century dates.
4. Find Your Requests - There is now an “Instructor” field on the art history search page. This field will help you find images you’ve requested. You can do this from the general search page, too, but this will work better if you want to find, for example, only the images you’ve requested by a certain artist or from a certain country.
5. Sort Your Results - You can now sort your results by title, artist, or date added. Sorting by title and/or artist should help you identify duplicates and choose which image you want to use. Sorting by “most recent” will help you find your most recent requests, or anything new by a certain artist, etc.

All in all, we think this will help you find what you need on DUVAGA! Please feel free to make suggestions for future enhancements, and do let us know if you aren’t able to find something you think should be in the repository — if it’s there, we’ll help you find it, and if it’s not, we’ll add it!