Tuesday, November 16, 2010

My Search for DVDs

I pride myself as an expert searcher. So, it really drives me insane when I get tripped up by how our catalog searches.

My family and I will be flying for Christmas and I decided one of the easiest ways to keep my son quiet on the flight would be to bring some videos along for him to watch. Up till this point, my son has only watched a few videos I've checked out from the library. However, we're going to be gone for 3 weeks which is longer than one can check out videos, even if I renew it once. I decided I would check out a couple of Elmo videos from the library to preview them and then buy one or two to take with us on our trip.

Since I just wanted videos, not books or music, I went to our catalog's Advanced Page. Next to Title Keyword I entered Elmo. Under Format I chose Video Recording - DVD and then clicked the red arrow to start my search. I retrieved around 17 videos. This was great except I remembered there was an Elmo video about pets that my son really liked that wasn't included in this list. If it wasn't included, what other videos might I be missing?

After a moment or two of thinking, I realized that the video I previously checked out was an "Elmo's World" video. Our catalog wasn't smart enough to realize that Elmo's and Elmo are essentially the same words. This is because our catalog doesn't have stemming capabilities. Once I figured out the problem, the solution was simple. I added an asterisk after Elmo so my search now looks like this. Since the asterisk works as a wildcard character in our catalog, it will find all DVDs with the words Elmo and Elmo's.

Friday, November 12, 2010

New Catalog is Up!

Yesterday we started the upgrade for our integrated library system (ILS) which includes the catalog. While we are still working on upgrading some parts of the ILS, the catalog has been updated and most of the bugs squashed. To use it, visit http://catalog.mylibrary.us/.

New Features:

  • Did You Mean
  • Series Information is now located in the left column of the full bib record. See The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for an example.
  • We also have some additional content that shows below the item information on the page. We are still playing with the formatting of both this content and the series content so this may change in the future.
  • Searching using boolean operators has changed. See Eileen's Video Tutorial for more information
  • Advanced Limits can now be removed without re-submitting a search. See Eileen's Video Tutorial for more information
  • Staff and patrons can now email search results (before staff email addresses didn't work). After retrieving search results, scroll down to the very bottom of the page and enter a subject and your email address.
  • More DVD images
  • The Holds page now has a "Suspend Until" column. This lets you see which holds you have suspended and when they will reactivate.
  • There is now a difference in notation between holds deleted in the public versus staff catalog interfaces.

For those of you that subscribed to HIP RSS feeds, that functionality isn't available yet but I expect it will be fixed in the next couple of days.