Success! Finding what you want in our catalog
Card Catalog? by OSU Archives, on Flickr
A common complaint that we get at the desk on the second floor is about our catalog. People often say they aren’t able to find what they’re looking for.
Library catalogs are designed to, amongst other things, support fairly complicated searches by library staff. This can mean that the average user gets stymied.
So until the library world develops catalogs that are easier to use (if only we had the resources of Amazon or Google), here are some tricks to help you get what you want, faster.
It seems like a great deal of our library users are looking for a particular title or author when searching the catalog. If you know the exact title or author you are looking for, the easiest and fastest way to get there is through the magic of Starts With.
The default search in our catalog is Keyword. But if you click on the Starts With tab, you might have more luck when looking for a specific title.
Once you’ve clicked the Starts With tab, you’ll see the search screen gets simpler. Let’s say you want to find Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. (A great book, by the way, I’m reading it right now.)
Just enter Wolf Hall in the search box (capitalization doesn’t matter), and you’ll see that the listing you want comes right to the top.
Search:
Result:
You get this targeted result because using Starts With means that you’re searching the catalog alphabetically, kind of like with the old-school card catalog in the picture at the beginning of the post.
This works great with authors too, when you know exactly what you’re looking for. Say you want to see what other books Hilary Mantel has written. Stick with the Starts With search, but change it to Author instead of Title.
Make sure you enter the author last name first (commas or capitalization don’t matter), and you’re good to go. Hilary Mantel is right at the top of the results screen.
I hope this helps take some of the frustration out of searching our catalog.
If you’re interested in seeing more blog posts like this, I would be happy to do a series of posts on using the catalog. What sort of things do you have trouble finding? Leave a comment and I’ll write a post addressing your questions.
Of course, we’re always happy to give you search tips in person, on the phone, via chat or email. Just ask!
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