No, we didn’t just move things around to keep you on your toes, the new features of the EasiCat program make searching for a book easier than ever.
When looking up an item, click on Search, and from the dropdown box choose between Keyword and Browse. Keyword is great if you’re not sure of the exact wording of the title, or if you’d like to see several related items. Browse is perfect if you know the exact title or author’s name, and you want the computer to browse through the alphabetic listing to find only that title or author.
For example, suppose you enjoyed watching Downton Abbey last winter, and you decide you’d like to watch it again while you wait for season 3 to come out. Click on Search, then Browse, and type in Downton Abbey, and you’ll see the DVDs for seasons 1 and 2. However, if you choose Search and Keyword, you’ll get the Downton Abbey DVDs plus a book called The World of Downton Abbey and another titled The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook. These titles didn’t appear in a Browse search, because they fall elsewhere in the alphabetic listing of library materials, but they show up in a Keyword search because Downton Abbey is a keyword in both titles.
Let’s say you want to watch DVDs that are similar to Downton Abbey. There’s a toolbar on the left-hand side of the screen that says Narrow Your Search. If you scroll down farther, you’ll see Related Searches, and under that, Subjects. You’d like to watch a film with servants and their masters, but you don’t see that subject listed. Click on More, and then Household employees pops up.
When you click on that, you see you have 110 matches. Now we’ll use the top of the left-hand toolbar to Narrow Your Choices. This is like shopping for shoes at Zappos. If you narrow yoursearch by selecting DVD under Type of Material, you get 9 results, including The Help, TheHousemaid, and Upstairs, Downstairs.
Now you decide you’d like to read a book instead, so you click on DVD to deselect it, and choose Book. There are 95 matches, so you narrow your Subject to Great Britain, then scroll down to Target Audience and choose General/Adult (other options include juvenile and adolescent). Then you choose to limit your search to just those books in our library, so you click on Frank L Weyenberg Library, which narrows your choices down to three, including The House at Tyneford and The Gentleman Poet. Now look at the right-hand side of your screen: clicking on Availability tells you that the book available in the AD New Fiction collection, so you head for the rotunda and find it under the author’s name, Solomons.
So the left-hand toolbar can be used two ways: starting with a broad topic, you can narrow your search, (think Zappos), or beginning with a particular book or movie title, you can broaden your search to find other similar items.
One last thing: The library carries items in several different formats. On the right-hand side of the screen you will see blue icons which tell the format of the item you are looking at: be sure to take note of those so that you get the format you desire.
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