Wish there were filtering by media type when browsing in Safari Montage!!

By Marcia Kemble on Thu, 12/16/2010 at 6:01 pm
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Marcia Kemble
Director of LIbrary & Media Services, Mid-Pacific Institute

Hello --

I hope this is the correct forum to use; I wasn't quite sure where is the appropriate place to enter "wish-list requests" with regard to Safari Montage's basic features.

At our school (where I am the Library Director), I try to encourage teachers to use the Subject Browse feature as well as the Keyword Search mode, as I believe that titles can be discovered by browsing in topic trees that might be relevant but would not easily be found via a Keyword search.  But there's a huge problem with browsing, which is that there is no option to filter the results by media type, as there is when you are searching.  And when you're browsing, the titles are not identified by media type in any way (e.g. a small icon).  So what happens frequently is that when you browse down to a particular topic, you may see what look like a number of videos, but only after you click on them do you discover that many are photos, not videos.  It can be really frustrating to plow through them to look for the videos; this problem makes browsing sometimes so frustrating so as to hardly be worth doing.

So I'd request two changes that would help with this:  1) Indicate the media type by a small icon next to the titles shown when browsing, and/or 2) PLEASE PLEASE add a media type filter on the Browse page.

Thank you for the opportunity to bring this up, and I'd welcome any comments about whether this problem is on anyone's radar screen.

M. Kemble

Picture of member, Lori Griffin

Lori Griffin
Executive Editor, SAFARI Montage

That’s a great suggestion Marcia. I will share it with our development team. We do have the option to filter by grade level, publisher and copyright under the Subject Browse, but not media type. I do think that would be a great addition to the system.

Thank you!