Adding to "New at the Library"

I've made a couple of changes to our New at the Library catalog page.

• Added a "New Spanish" section
• Renamed "New DVD" to "New Movie & TV" and added links to new Blu-ray and TV Series
• Added YA Non-fiction and Audiobook links to the "New YA" section
• Reordered everything to make the expanded options fit better in two columns

I've also made a minor change to the Advanced search page. There is no longer an "All" category for locations, formats, audience, and new items. It was getting too hard to keep the collection codes straight. Instead, if you wish to deselect a limit after you've already clicked on it, hold down the ctrl key on your keyboard and click on the limit you wish to remove.

Sorry, could not find anything matching

I was reading posts on my romance listserv this morning and someone mentioned that Carola Dunn wrote a mystery series set in the 1960s. The poster had read the second book in the series, A Colourful Death, and thought it was interesting. I've enjoyed Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple series so thought I'd look this one up and give it a try.

I started with an Author - Alphabetical search but quickly wimped out when I saw there were 43 titles by Dunn. Then, I decided it would be faster to do a title search for "A Colorful Death" and then use the series info on the left side of the page to figure out the first book.

When I did a Title Keyword search for a colorful death, I got no results. At first, I was worried we might not have it. Then, I decided adding the article a to the phrase was a mistake since catalogs often ignore articles if it's the first word of a title. I changed my search to just "colorful death" and was taken to the correct record!

I was excited and decided I needed to write a post warning everyone about including initial articles when doing a phrase search. Except . . . that wasn't the reason my search worked. The real reason my first title keyword search hadn't returned anything was because I had used the US spelling for "colorful" instead of the UK spelling of "colourful." If I had searched for "A Colourful Death", I would have seen that we actually had two editions of that book. The only reason my second title keyword search returned anything was because "colorful death" was listed as an Additional Title in the MARC record for that specific edition.

The moral of the story is to always double check your spelling when the catalog doesn't return the results you want. Even though we now have a Did You Mean feature, it's not going to catch every error that I make.

Several years ago I ran across a fantastic article about The Seven Deadly Nyms. It lists several other ways to accidentally mess up your search results. While search engines and catalogs continue to evolve, they still tend to return the results we asked for, not the results we want.

More Changes

Wow, it's been busy this summer. This Sunday I made a couple of different changes to the catalog.

Permanent Link
I've added a "permanent link" option to the catalog. This link is in the full bib view for a title and is located on the bottom left side right above the "MARC Display" link.

Why do you care? Currently, the link that appears in the address bar is very long and unwieldy. For example, this is the original URL for Jennifer Crusie's book Faking It:
http://catalog.mylibrary.us/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=131R91I5819K0.9033&profile=weld&source=~!horizon&view=subscriptionsummary&uri=full=3100001~!921724~!6&ri=1&aspect=subtab240&menu=search&ipp=20&spp=20&staffonly=&term=faking+it&index=.TS&uindex=&aspect=subtab240&menu=search&ri=1
As you can see, it's horrible. This is the shortened permanent link for the title: http://catalog.mylibrary.us/ipac20/ipac.jsp?index=ISBNEX&term=0312284683.

This feature is still in testing so there are a couple of caveats. First, when possible, I have the catalog connect using the title's ISBN. This is a slightly more stable number than the bib number. If the ISBN doesn't exist, it next looks for a UPC (many movies and music CDs don't have ISBNs). However, it turns out that multiple products could have the same UPC. See this link for an example. I'm still debating with myself if I'll keep the UPC search as an option. If it doesn't have either an ISBN or a UPC it will use the "search URI" link. I'll probably continue tinkering with this over the next couple of weeks to refine it but the general concept should work.

Please let me know what you think of it and if you run into any problems trying to use it.

New collection code for Overdrive eBooks
Tech services has added a new collection code for Overdrive eBooks. This means that you can now search for eBooks separate from Audio eBooks. To limit to Audio eBooks, go to the Advanced search page and then under the Format box highlight Books - Audio eBooks. To search for just eBooks, follow the same steps except highlight Books - eBooks.

Note: we have eBooks from a variety of different vendors including Overdrive, Safari, and Netlibrary. Books from Safari tend to be technology related while Overdrive books tend to be newer than the Netlibrary books. So, if you just want books from a particular vendor, you can enter "overdrive" or "safari" as a General Keyword search and use it in combination with the eBook limit.

New Electronic Resource Images
We found that some borrowers were confused by the records for electronic books showing up in the catalog. To try to make it clearer, we've added images that say, "Get Audio eBook Now", "Connect Now", or "Get eBook Now" along with the direct link to access these resources. You can see examples here:

• Audio eBook - A Hat Full of Sky
• Safari eBook - Using iPhone
• Overdrive eBook - The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth

As always, let me know if you have any questions about any of these.