The August release is now live on the site. You can get a detailed description of the release on the Development blog, but there one element of the release that could use a bit more clarification.

The last item of the Fixes section of the release announcement describes a correction to the Advance Search functionality when searching numbers. At first glance this fix may seem like a small and not that consequential change, but this little fix actually reveals a lot about how number searches work on RDA Toolkit. Several weeks ago we got an email form a user who was frustrated when her search for AACR2 rule 2.6 took her directly to RDA instruction 2.6.

The user thought by entering her number query on the Advanced Search page and selecting AACR2 in the document menu while also deselecting RDA, she would get the AACR2 rule in her search results. But she did not. Why? Because we created a special shortcut that took any number search directly to the matching RDA instruction. However, in this case the shortcut only served to block the user from finding the information she needed. The fix for this problem, as introduced with the August release, is to turn off the shortcut in the Advanced Search whenever RDA is deselected from the document menu. So now an Advanced Search of 2.6 with AACR2 selected and RDA deselected in document menu will give the result shown below.

Of course, this is not necessarily a perfect solution for all the possible number queries a user might have. In many cases users will be well served to use phrasing in their search. Phrasing refers to the use of quotation marks around your search terms so that the entire query will be searched a a single phrase. Using phrasing in a number search will give you broader results that will also include children and cross-references to the searched number. So a phrased search of 2.6 in both AACR2 and RDA returns 136 results, with AACR2's 2.6 showing as the first result and RDA's 2.6.1 showing up as the 10th result (2.6 is number 20 on the list).