Search Use Cases

The Cleveland Museum of Art

CMS Demonstration Scenarios

Curatorial: Search capabilities demonstrate how:

1. A curator might determine how many works are in the collection were once owned by an individual?
2. Which works in a collection were shown in a specific exhibition?
3. How many times in the last x number of years have works been loaned to exhibitions at a specific museum?
4. Which works in the collections are by American artists who were born in Ireland?
5. When was a specific work last on public display in the galleries?
6. Sort works by donor
7. Sort works by subject
8. A user can export records to a tombstone label?
9. A user can export records to an art movement form?

General: Searching

Exact, phrase and keyword options should be available for all indexed fields. Wild card searching should be an option.

All fields should be indexed and all indexes should be searchable exclusively or in combination.

EXAMPLES:

Find all records with blue in the title and painting in the material type.

"Words adjacent," you can type in the phrase German expressionism and the system will understand that you want only records that have the word German NEXT to the word expressionism.

Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT in your search. For example, you could type (prints OR drawings) AND Picasso to retrieve all records having prints or drawings in them, together with the word Picasso.

Word Stemming to find matches that contain portions of words. For example, paint? will retrieve paint, paints, painting, paintings, painter, etc. In another example, ? ology will retrieve anthropology, archaeology, egyptology, etc. The ? character may also be used to find variant spellings. For example, brueg?el will find both brueghel and bruegel.
If you searched Frederick Church and wanted to expand your search to other landscape paintings owned by CMA a subject link would allow you to do this. Additionally, if you wished to search all works by Church owned by CMA in line-linking would be functional.

PAHMA

From Services Team Design Meeting August 27, 2009, possibly relating to ordering search results:

Specifying Sort Order

Another key concept that emerged from the design meeting was that of sort order. This discussion touched on how clients/applications should be able to query objects (or the services that provide them) for their sort keys, and on how sorting might work. One model:

1. There would be some general algorithms for sorting, presumably varying by data type.
2. Museums could provide their own set of rules for sorting any particular key, which would override the general algorithm. Examples: "sort numerically on the first part of an accession number, ignore the hyphen that follows, then sort string-wise on the next part..." or "ignore initial articles, like 'the', unless the name is in French".
3. There would be an ability to provide sorting 'hints' on a record-by-record basis that would effectively change the sort position of those records.

The ID Service will likely need to provide a mechanism for sorting on Object numbers and Other numbers.

Walker Art Center

From Walker Art Center - January 26, 2010:

SMK

Advanced Search – SMK Requirements

We need to be able to compose advanced search strings using Boolean operators (including brackets) or a similar approach, not just in keyword searches, but also in field based searches. 

In principle all fields (whether CS Core or extensions) should be searchable across record types. And each field should be allowed to appear more than once in an extended search string.

Concept search (i.e. a search on a larger concept returns that concept as well as things that fall under that larger concept) is a must have to SMK.

Use cases: 

All works of art on paper by artists born between 1900 and 1950

All works of art by Henri Matisse currently on display

All works of art acquired between 01.01.2010 and 31.12.2010

All works of art by female artists acquired in 1980

All works of art in either KMS (department) or KKS (department) dated between 1500 and 1650

All works of art by living artists, or artists who died after 31.12.1941

All works of art with data in the Object Production Note field

All works of art with the term Founder's Mark in the Object Production Note field

All works of art currently on loan (within the museum)

All works of art deposited at external locations

All paintings acquired before 1850

All Flemish artists born before 1700

All artists lacking Nationality

All artists added to the database in and after 1980