Enter Search Terms to Trigger the Featured Resources

The featured resources appear only if the keywords contained in the PAC user's search term match those defined as a positive trigger for the featured resource. You can also specify words or phrases as negative triggers that will prevent the display of the featured resource. For more information, see Promotion Triggers and PAC Searches.

To enter promotion triggers:

1. Open the Promotions workform, and go to the Triggers view.

Tips:
Wild card characters, such as an asterisk, are not supported for triggers.

The trigger words should not match words already in the record being featured so that the same record does not appear in search results and as a featured resource.

It may be useful to think of a Boolean OR between triggers, a Boolean AND for multiple words within a single unquoted trigger, and a Boolean AND with a proximity value of '1' (ordered) for multiple words within a quoted trigger.

2. In the Freetext column, type the text that triggers the display of the featured resource as follows:
   • Enter a single keyword per line. The PAC user must enter any or all of the keywords for the resource to be featured.
   • Enter a phrase on a line. The PAC user must enter the entire phrase for the resource to be featured. If the phrase has double quotes around it, the PAC user must enter the entire phrase in the same order without any other words. If the phrase is not in quotes, the PAC user must enter all the words, but they can be in any order.
3. In the Type column, select the box to open the list of search types.

If your library has a license for Community Profiles, the following types appear in the list:

• Author or Organization
• General Notes
• Genre
• Publisher
• Series
• Subject or Services
• Title or Event Name

If your library does not have a license for Community Profiles, the following types appear in the list:

• Author
• General Notes
• Genre
• Publisher
• Series
• Subject
• Title

4. Select the type(s) of searches to which the search terms apply.
5.  If the search terms entered should prevent the resource from being featured, select the Negative box.

Note:
The promotion record must have at least one positive trigger in order for a negative trigger to operate. For more information, see Promotion Triggers and PAC Searches.

6. Type in the next available line to enter more search terms.
7. To move a trigger up or down in the list, select it and click the up or down arrow.

Note:
The order of the triggers on the workform does not affect processing or relevancy ranking.

8. To normalize (remove un-indexable characters) from a search term, select it and click . When search terms are normalized, you can see the actual keywords.
9. Select File > Save.

Promotion Triggers and PAC Searches

How Polaris matches promotion triggers to PAC searches:

• When a PAC user enters a search query, all search terms are extracted and normalized. Keyword, phrase and exact match search queries are all treated the same way.
• An ordered keyword list is created that contains up to 16 normalized keywords.
• If the ordered keyword list matches one or more positive promotion triggers (and zero negative triggers), the search query matches the promotion.

Positive and Negative Triggers

When looking for matching promotions, Polaris first looks for a matching trigger (keyword, quoted phrase, unquoted phrase) and then considers whether the trigger is positive or negative. At least one positive trigger must be entered for a negative trigger to operate.

If a trigger type is checked and the library patron searches by that access point or by the “any field” access point (KW) for either bibliographic or community records, then Polaris attempts to find matching promotions.

Example:
Promotion has 6 positive triggers and 1 negative trigger. The triggers are:
Quilting - (all) - positive
Knitting - (all) - positive
Crochet - (all) - positive
Sewing - Title/Event Name - negative
Crocheting - (all) - positive
Quilters - (all) - positive
Needlework - (all) - positive

The PAC user does a keyword Subject search for Knitting Sewing. The promotion should be returned because of the positive filter Knitting (all). Sewing is a negative filter but just for Title/Event Name and since the search was a subject search, Sewing was not a matching trigger.

If a trigger is restricted to a subset of trigger types, then it applies when the access point is KW (regardless of whether the trigger is positive or negative). In other words, if SEWING is a negative trigger restricted to the Title/Event Name, then it applies when the access point is TI or KW.

Normalizing Triggers

When you click the Normalize icon un-indexable characters are removed from the display of the trigger so the user can see how the string will be indexed in the database.

Example:

"***race*** [Car] Driver" would normalize to "race car driver".

"**$%#" would normalize to "". In this case the trigger would be ignored and/or removed automatically.

The normalization rules used here are the same as those used for keyword normalization in bibliographic records.   

These are some of the characters that are retained:

• Double quotes

• Diacritics and most Unicode characters

• Apostrophes

• Hyphens

These are some of the characters that are removed and replaced with a space:

• Asterisk

• Dollar sign

• Percent sign

• Pound sign

• Opening and closing square brackets

Additional indexing rules may apply to some forms of punctuation:

Example:
The normalized form of dog’s bone retains the apostrophe, but the user can search on either dog’s bone or dogs bone and get a match.

For words that contain characters that are stripped out by the normalization rules, enter two triggers: one with the original spelling, and one with the equivalent characters:

Example:
For the search term Kei$ha, enter two triggers: keisha and kei$ha. This way, a match will occur when the user searches for either version of the name.