Comment 21 for bug 939570

Mike, I work with library patrons on a daily basis; that's the experience I'm basing my concerns on.

Mixing libraries and collections of shelving locations into the same undifferentiated picker, without providing any sort of guidance as to what a given selection contains beyond the name of the thing, seems like the huge thing that you may be missing.

On the other hand, it might be a good way to boost reference stats. The following sort of scenario seems utterly plausible, based on experiences that I've had with patrons confused by even the existing search library / search scope UI we have in the JSPAC:

'I'm looking for "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" but can't find a copy."

"What were you searching?"

"I tried searching by title, and I changed the search library from 'Our Local System' to 'Sci-fi Collections' because it's an SF title."

"Oh, well you chose the collection that (the Consortium | the System | another Library) created, but we don't have a dedicated Sci-fi section and they must not have included our YA Fiction shelf. Let's search Library A instead. Ah, there you go, it's actually over on the "Monthly Display" shelf, I guess it's British Humour month."

I think the primary problem with copy location groups and the current UI is that the nature of these copy location groups is utterly opaque to the user; we provide them with no affordances - other than the name - to know that 1) what they're searching is a subset of the entire collection of a given library or set of libraries 2) what scope the collection cuts across - it could include libraries from the entire State when they're interested in only the library they're standing in 3) what shelving locations are actually in the collection group 4) what the purpose of the collection group is.

By comparison, the search scope of a library is explicit: it is everything in a library.

As I noted in a previous comment, this feature seems much more suited for library staff performing specific searches who will have a better idea of what these collection groups mean, rather than towards regular patrons who will be guessing blindly (and increasing the likelihood of preventing themselves from finding a copy of the item they're looking for).