Modifications to Abraquest Search

This blog post describes the recent changes to the Abraquest Search features, making it even easier to use.

When Abraquest is started, the main search page appears:

Abraquest Book Search for Pupils

The page looks very similar to the previous page, however a number of small changes have been made to make it easier to use.

What follows is a list of the more common possiblities:

1. You can click on the keyword on the left and find all books with that keyword in title, author, subject of the book.
2. You can click a letter button, which gives all books with title, author or subject beginning with that letter.
3. You can filter this further by choosing title for example and then clicking a letter button, to give all books with a title beginning with that letter.
4. When the page starts, ALL BOOKS are shown. This is different to last time.
5. Remove Search will return to show ALL BOOKS. This is also different, and we hope, simpler to understand.
6. You can filter using the filter row between the header and the books, for example if you put in Birds into the title filter box, Abraquest will return all books with Birds anywhere in the title. This also is slightly different and again we hope, simpler to understand.

No matter how you found it, you can click Cat Card to view the book details.

We intend to improve these facilities further in future, as part of a future release which identifies pupils, to optonally allow reservations and reviews to be made without teacher being present, along with other new features. This will be done in two stages: Identifying the Pupil, then adding the features, possibly offering a new interface for pupils only as an option, that is very visual and super easy to use.

As always, we would love to hear your views. Feel free to contact us anytime.

About the author

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson has been a software developer since 1983 and has been involved with Abraquest since 2004. He is the director of Spherical Software Limited (www.sphericalsoftware.com), the company that owns Abraquest.