Some thoughts on Record Search changes

We have been told for some time that the Pilot Site would be going away eventually.

During that time changes have been made to Record Search, the availability of records has dramatically increased, but new records have not been added to Pilot, and the functionality has been improved. There were things with the Pilot Search feature that I thought were better, although I have recently noticed that the Record Search search feature has changed also. I’m not sure how the system works with accented letters, for example. I have found I cannot put in words with accents, but the results may have accents, depending on how the data was entered.

The advanced search works OK, but improvements could be made. The “match term exactly” check box seems to be “sort of” workable; I still get results that don’t match, but these seem to be separated from the others (ie, further down on the list).

A feature I like is that I can copy text from Record Search results, but could not from Pilot.

I would like to think that everything that was available in Pilot has been transferred to Record Search.

The older IGI, which is still available, has some features that are nice, but once again, it has been rather limited in the available data, and some of the search features there are subject to rather arbitrary constraints. New data is not being added. “Limited” is perhaps an odd term; there are millions of records in the IGI, but there are billions at Record Search.

I had considered the three systems complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, and developed some processes for effective and hopefully, thorough search. As Record Search continues to improve, the features that were in Pilot will seem less useful.

I can see Record Search continuing to evolve. As many more records go online, the current structure for finding specific record sets is going to get unwieldy, so changes will need to be made.

I can also envision the search functionality getting to be more sophisticated. I would like to see the addition of a wildcard search.

Rather than complain, I would suggest we offer constructive comments. We should note that the developers must look at our suggestions in view of the bigger user group. A change that effects only a small set of users, while not addressing the larger issues is not a good use of resources. This also goes with what records are made available when. There are certain areas that I would really like to see, but they may be further down on the list, and will eventually get there. I was thrilled when Aguascalientes came on line, and was a little dismayed that Zacatecas was at the end of the alphabet. Needless to say, when it came on line, I was pleased. We need some patience.

I look back at the hours I’ve spent at the old microfilm readers (not to mention the cost), and recall marking the spools of film with little pieces of paper so I could take it to the scanner/printer people to get a print, that was sometimes good, but more often not. The digital images we have today are really pretty amazing. We’ve come a long ways since then, and will continue to improve.

I, for one, am truly grateful for the resources we have been given.

George Fulton