How do I enter Boolean operators in the hub?
From 6 May 2022, you will need to enter your Boolean terms in lower case.
In April 2022, we made a change to how Boolean operators work in the hub, so that you had to enter them in upper case. We still think the reasoning behind doing this was correct:
When entered in lower case, Boolean operators (and, or, not) cannot be used for their normal language meanings. For example, if a user searches for the phrase 'lack of sleep is not ideal', the Hub will interpret the word 'not' as a Boolean operator and so won't retrieve results which contain the word 'ideal'.
Most users of discovery systems use natural language searching and don’t use Boolean operators. Setting the requirement to enter Boolean operators in upper case means that the default (lower case) is a natural language search and will retrieve as expected for the majority of users. It also means that Boolean operators can be used for more advanced searchers without compromising more basic searching.
However, changing to upper case Boolean has thrown up an issue that we hadn't anticipated, which means that the popular terms function doesn't work, and users are getting far fewer results than they expect when using the popular terms function (as the search is now ignoring the lower case or, ANDing all the suggested terms together).
We've been in touch with EBSCO, and there isn't a quick fix for this - they've logged our request to change the Boolean operators in the popular terms suggestions as an enhancement request at their end. But we don't have a date for this to be implemented.
So we've made the decision to change this back, until EBSCO are able to implement the fix to popular terms suggestions.
On the 6th May, we will make a global change for all hub instances, so that Boolean operators can be entered in lower case again.
We apologise for the confusion that this may cause, but feel this is the best option for now, in light of feedback from library colleagues.
If you want to continue using upper case Boolean operators for your own instance of the hub, you can change this yourself:
Step 1 - Go to EBSCOadmin and sign in
Step 2 - Select your EDS profile:
Step 3 - Select the Searching tab, then change the setting "Require uppercase Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT)" from OFF to ON:
Step 4 - Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Submit.
NB: If you want to keep Boolean as upper case, you should also switch off the popular terms suggestion function, otherwise your users will get some unexpected results:
From the same Searching tab, scroll down to Autocomplete Keyword, and switch it from On to Off:
Scroll to the bottom of the page and select Submit.