The New York Post has a sad story.
The New York Police Department recently created an online database to connect 9/11 families with some of the jewelry and personal belongings the NYPD found at Ground Zero.
But the families are saying the site is too hard to use.
One of the problems is that the police can't be too descriptive in their presentation of the jewelry they have, or it opens up the door for anyone to walk in and claim the material. But another problem seems to be that whoever inventoried — or cataloged, really — the materials only chose one characteristic for each piece of jewelry. So if you're looking for a 14k gold, clip earring with a religious theme, you have to run three separate searches. Now I haven't used the database, but one of the family members told the Post, "There were too many categories for any single item, and the articles I was looking for could be in any one of several."
The NYPD might have come up with a more helpful design for their database if they had thought more about the people who'll be using it. Whenever you give a work multiple categories, or subject headings, you greatly improve the odds someone will find it. A quick look through CUNY+ shows most books have at least two subject headings. Plus, you can search them by title or author, so you have a few different ways to find what you're looking for. But if you could only search one way, like say just by title, then you'd have a much tougher time finding anything. And what if we couldn't use Boolean searching? Without those AND and OR connectors, we'd have to run a lot more searches in the catalog and in the databases.
Everyone searches in different ways. The best way to make sure everyone finds what they need is to give them options. It sounds like this jewelry database isn't doing that yet.