Wishlist: Limit by extent in physical description

[Benjamin Kalish]

This is a nonstandard feature that would take some work to implement, but it would be fantastic if we could limit a search based on the extent of an item as determined by the physical description on a record.

This came up in a discussion with colleague where we realized that we often get reader’s advisory requests with limitations on extent:

- Nothing above 400 pages please!
- I’m looking for an audiobook that will take about 6 hours to listen to”
- I’m traveling and need something good to read that won’t take up too much space in my carry on.

Currently we come up with lots of possible titles, then look at the physical description for each title and eliminate those that don’t match. It would be so much better if we could search.

An approach that might make sense:

- Create new fields (to store these values)
- For all existing records, and for each new record, as it is entered, do some text analysis to populate the extent fields whenever the physical description fits one of a number of predictable patterns
- allow library staff to update these fields in case the automatic procedure can’t identify the extent or gets it wrong

This feature would be valuable even with data missing, as it inevitably would be, on some records.