FindMore@NUSL was launched on 12 Dec 2012 and has seen over 340 thousand visits and 1.1 million searches. We have received numerous feedback and are continually improving the system.

Some improvements which we have made include:

• Adding of new materials, including open-access e-journals and e-book packages
• More accurate display of content types, especially for e-books
• Various small tweaks to the interface for usability, such as clarifying of confusing terms
• Setting up of database and “best bets” recommendations

Some users have suggested that the relevancy ranking can be improved, and this is something we are working on. In the meantime, the statistics we have gathered show that the Book/eBook filter at the results page is used very often. Hence, we have added new radio buttons below the search box:

This helps to save time, as you can now pre-filter the results to only Books or Articles if that is the material type which you need. Of course, you can always use the default “Everything” option.

You can further filter the results by author, as shown at the bottom left corner of the screencapture below:

While this tweak helps, it does not resolve all relevancy ranking issues. You may want to try the recommendations that may appear for better results:

We are planning to release the next major update, FindMore@NUSL version 2.0, in July/August 2013. This upgrade will improve the user interface with the grouping and spotlighting of similar materials such as newspapers articles or reference works. Moreover, the automatic query expansion feature will further improve relevancy ranking by automatically searching for synonyms when appropriate. For example when you search for “heart attack” it will also search for the technical term, Myocardial infarction.

Do continue to let us know your thoughts about FindMore@NUSL as we work to improve it further.

Aaron Tay
FindMore Support Team 

Professor E. P. Ellinger is a Professor Emeritus of the National University of Singapore. In April, C J Koh Law Library put up a display of works by Prof. Ellinger to commemorate his many years of teaching at the NUS Faculty of Law.

Peter Ellinger was born in Vienna, Austria to a Jewish family on 25^th April 1933. The family eventually settled in Tel Aviv where he graduated in 1959 with an M. Jur. Degree from Hebrew University (Jerusalem). He started work at the Faculty of Law in Singapore in 1961 and in 1963, he married a Singaporean Chinese lady who was a school teacher.

Prof. Ellinger obtained his doctorate from St. Catherine’s College of Oxford in 1964. His thesis formed the basis of the book Documentary Letter of Credit: A Comparative Study, which was published in 1970 and established Prof. Ellinger’s reputation as a leading scholar in banking law.

He has published a number of books on the subject, including Modern Banking Law (Oxford university Press), The Law and Practice of Documentary Letters of Credit (with Dora Neo) and chapters in Benjamin’s Sales of Goods and Chitty on Contracts, as well as many articles in scholarly periodicals.

In 1967, Prof. Ellinger accepted a chair at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand where he stayed for 10 years before moving to Melbourne, Australia in 1977. In 1986 he rejoined the Faculty of Law in NUS and has remained a well-respected professor and scholar ever since.

We wish Professor Ellinger many years of good health and happiness in his retirement.

Reference:

Neo, D. S. S. (2007). Biography of Peter Ellinger. In D. S. S. Neo, H. W. Tang & M. Y. M. Hor (Eds.), Lives in the Law: Essays in honor of Peter Ellinger, Koh Kheng Lian, Tan Sook Yee. Singapore: NUS, Faculty of Law: Academy Pub.

Bissy Ithack
C J Koh Law Library