Allen Library's First Video Tutorial

We are always looking for new ways to help you find information, and today marks our first foray into video tutorials. Instead of just writing down instructions and adding in some screenshots, these video tutorials (okay, there's only one right now) actually show you the whole process and explain what is happening. Make sure you have your speakers on so you can hear the explanation. The first video tutorial is a quick one-minute presentation on how to find books in our catalog. I'll probably be adding some more complex ones, but this one should be a good start. You can find it here: http://library.hartford.edu/allenlibrary/findbook_video.asp. Please let me know what you think about it and feel free to send some suggestions as to what tutorials you would like to see in the future!

Good News in the World of Accents

I just have a quick update of the last post. Since I wrote about some of the major bugs in our new catalog, one of them has been fixed. It seems that accents are no longer an issue. So if you're searching for Bartók, you can now just type Bartok, just like in the old catalog. This should make searching a lot easier.

Using the New Catalog: Part 1

As you might have noticed, it's been awhile since I updated the blog. We've been pretty busy here trying to figure out the new catalog and I haven't wanted to post on it until I had only wonderful news. Well, 1.5 months later, it's still not perfect, but there's some really cool features to tell you about and some bugs you need to know about. Since the bugs are more likely to affect how you use the catalog day to day, we'll start with those. And just so you know, we are trying to get all of the bugs fixed, so I'll let you know if/when that happens.

Accents
If you are searching for anything (composer, author, title, etc.) that has an accent in it, you have to be really careful. For example, this catalog considers Bartok and Bartók to be two different people. So if you want a better search, go into Advanced Search and put the two different versions into two different fields with an OR between them. NOTE: There's another bug that causes problems in Safari and Google Chrome, so if you get unexpected results using those browsers, just switch to a different one.

Refine Your Search
After performing a search, you'll see a "Refine Your Search" section on the left side of the screen. This looks really useful, but it is currently just grabbing results from the results page in front of you. So it's only based on 20 results at a time, even if there are hundreds of actual results. This makes it not quite as useful, although it is a good place to find names with proper accents to copy and then paste into a search (see Accents section above).

Printed Music Icon
If you're looking for a score, don't be confused by the icon that looks like a speaker with Type: Sound next to it. This is just another bug that needs to be fixed. For now, just look at the call number. Scores will start with M or MM (and sometimes MT for teaching material).

Display of Multiple Works
If you are looking at the details page for score or sound recording that has multiple works in it, you might not always be able to see what all of the works are right away. Again, we're working on fixing that, but in the meantime, you might need to look a little deeper for this information. The first place you can try is the Descriptions tab between Holdings and Comments (under the bibliographic information). If the information isn't there, try looking at the Card View (ISBD) tab, which is the fourth tab underneath the author's name.

So those are a few of the quirks to be aware of. There are some more, so if you see something odd or just aren't finding what you would expect to find, please come talk to me or another member of the Allen staff. We might have some ideas that could help. Within the next week or so I'll try to get another post up about some of the cool features of the new catalog. Stay tuned!

The New Library Catalog and You

In one week, if all goes according to plan, University Libraries will jump over to a new (excuse the library terminology) Integrated Library System (or ILS). I know that sounds really boring, but it is actually quite exiting and will affect you. An ILS is basically a collection of databases that controls much of what we do in a library, including cataloging all of our items, keeping track of our patrons, circulating items to patrons, tracking what periodicals we have received, etc. The front end of the ILS is the library catalog. You know, that thing you use to find what we have in the library. This will be new as well.

The new catalog is the biggest difference for you and you’ll definitely want to spend some time getting to know it. The searching is radically different from our current catalog in that it will be much more forgiving if your search isn’t quite perfect. For example, you’ll no longer have to put AND between your terms. Like Google searching, it is assumed. Unfortunately, it is tricky to use OR, so come see me if you want to do that. It also will forgive some minor spelling mistakes and will look for any words that start with what you typed (this is called truncation, if you were curious). For example, typing symphon will find symphony, symphonies, symphonic, symphonie, etc. This is very useful in music, where these generic names are often slightly different than what you expect. There are a lot more changes in the catalog, and I’ll try to introduce them to you a little at a time.

The other big difference that you may notice is that we might be a little slower at circulation as we get used to the new system. Just be patient; we’ll figure it out as quickly as we can!

As always, feel free to ask any of the library staff if you have any questions or need any help. Enjoy!