Wednesday 23 November 2016

New HDAS: combining and deduplicating results from multiple databases


What's the best way of doing this in the new HDAS? In the old HDAS I would simply combine results from different databases using the de-duplication button (assuming the total number of results was 500 or less). The deduplication wasn't perfect, of course, but it was a good start and I could then pick out the results I wanted to keep from the more or less de-duplicated list.
In the new HDAS it seems that I have to add results from the different databases to "Saved Results", de-duplicate from there (mostly by scanning through an alphabetical ordering of the titles) and then pick out the results I want to discard. There doesn't seem to be a way of selecting a few search results and exporting just those ones. The process is more time-consuming because:
·         as far as I can see the maximum number of results which can be added to "Saved Results" in one go is 100, i.e. the maximum number of results which can be viewed on one page
·         I now have to tick all the results I want to discard rather than ticking the ones I want to keep (perhaps my search strategies are deficient but I usually end up discarding more search results than I keep)

 Written by  Paul Lee (Assistant Librarian, Reay House Library, Lambeth Hospital)