Managing library favorites

Library favorites is a service that lets your library (or consortium) select URLs that are then indexed and displayed in patron search results when they match patrons’ search criteria. It gives you the ability to include any web-based, non-library data in patrons’ search results. When library favorites appear in the search results, each entry displays a hyperlink to the item’s web location and relevance ranking. The author, summary, publication date, and library information will not display for a library favorite URL.

	Library Favorites was a free subscription service, but has been deprecated and is no longer actively supported by SirsiDynix. Current access is unaffected, but future software updates may remove the feature entirely.

	Applying a library limit to your search results will not limit any library favorites from your search results. Applying a facet to your search results will remove any library favorites from your search results.

In order to display library favorite URLs in search results, you must first set up the Library Favorites search target. Once you have set up the Library Favorites search target, you must specify the URLs that you want to use as library favorites. Once you have set up Library Favorites for a specific profile, Portfolio will crawl the web location and then index the data for patron searching.

	Depending on the number of URLs that you want to use as library favorites and the amount of data associated with each URL, it may take up to one month for library favorites URLs to begin appearing in patrons’ search results.

When choosing which URLs to use as library favorites, be aware that the amount of data available on a website and the crawl mode that you choose will affect how long it takes for Portfolio to crawl the data at that URL, as well as the number of library favorite hits that appear in the search results. For example, if you choose a URL with a large amount of data as a library favorite and then set the crawl mode to crawl all the data at the domain level, the amount of data from the library favorite URL would overwhelm the catalog results when search results are returned. When Portfolio crawls a URL, it captures data from these file types: TXT, HTML, PDF, PPT, XLS, RTF, and DOC.

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SirsiDynix recommends that you choose a limited number of library favorite URLs (such as your own library’s website) and choose to crawl the URLs at the “single page” or “folder” crawl mode. In cases where you want to specify a larger number of library favorite URLs, SirsiDynix recommends that you create a separate search profile dedicated to Library Favorites and then make that profile accessible for patrons to search.

This section explains these topics: