The BOSS, at Oklahoma State University’s library, is the Big Orange Search System. It’s an alternative online card catalog, one that shows users not just the university’s holdings but a constellation of related search terms, any one of which might lead a user to information gold.
The system uses a technology called “faceted search,” which features options to refine results and narrow things down. It also lets a user broaden a search using a “word cloud”: terms that surround the original search text and consist of associations, spelling variations, translations, and words a user has already tried.
Oklahoma’s colors tend toward the orange, hence the search engine’s nickname. That information, however, didn’t come up in a BOSS search when a user typed in “Big Orange.” It was on the university’s Web site, though. No search algorithm is perfect. —Josh Fischman
