Advanced/Guided Search on the Library Catalogue

This has come up a couple of times recently in the content of searching for e-dissertations (I can eke out another short post about that however), and so merits escalating to a blog post (DEFCON 3 is next).

We have had a couple of queries from user who have been unable to use the guided search or advanced search options and the drop down boxes for media or field selection have been greyed (grayed?) out.  Here's a couple of suggestions to resolve matters:

1) Change browsers. Switch to Firefox or Chrome as this problem has only cropped up with Internet Explorer.  If I may editorialise briefly, you should consider switching to Firefox or Chrome as both are better than Internet Explorer (in my humble opinion of course).  If you are on-campus, this is a better solution as the one below may not work.

2) If you really prefer to stay with Internet Explorer, then take the following steps (these instructions come from the library catalogue vendor's technical support department):

1) Click on the Tools icon (a small cog in the upper right hand corner of IE's Window).
2) Select "Internet options" from the list that comes up.
3) Now click on the "Security" tab that comes up in the new "Internet options" window.
4) Please now click on the "Custom level..." button.
5) The window "Security Settings - Internet Zone" should now be open.
6) Please scroll just about all the way down to find the "Scripting" section.
7) The "Active scripting" radio button will currently either be set to "Disable" or "Prompt" neither is desirable and will cause the issue as described. Please set it to "Enable".
8) Finally click on the "OK" button twice to bring you back to IE and try the library catalogue again    

Library Catalogue - One click searching

In the online library catalogue, it's possible to highlight a word or phrase in and then search for it (on the catalogue) by using a right mouse click. I was thinking of disabling the feature because I don't find it useful at all, but if anyone cares to disagree with me, I'll leave it be. So, any thoughts on the utility of one click searching here?

Searching the library catalogue - what every student NEEDS to know - Final part

Here's the final part of the 'searching the DBS library catalogue' online tutorial series. Part 3 shows you how to login to view your library account details online, to renew and reserve books.

Remember these tutorials are also available on the main library site under 'library guides/library catalogues'.

Searching the library catalogue - what every student NEEDS to know - PART 2

Here is the second part of our online tutorials on 'searching the DBS Library catalogue'. This part shows you how to perform advanced searches and narrow down your search to specific sites (Aungier st or Dame st) and how to search for specific material like DVD's or Dissertations.

Searching the library catalogue - what every student NEEDS to know

It has become increasingly clear to library staff that an alarming number of students are STILL unacquainted with looking up book details and checking availability on the library catalogue.
Being able to look up bibliographic and availability details on the library catalogue is a basic skill that all third level students should have. A significant amount of traffic at the enquiry desk is taken up with students' requests to look up book availability for them. Library staff are only too happy to train students on searching the library catalogue with the assumption that, once they are familliar with catalogue searching, they can save themselves (and library staff) time by checking a books availability before they come to the library. However, there is still an unhealthy percentage of students who are unwilling to look up catalogue details for themselves.

Library staff want to be as accomodating as possible in assisting students with their book searches, however, as (we assume) all students are here to learn, we'd rather help you to help yourselves as it were. Learning how to search the catalogue and locate the library material you need is an important part of your overall learning experience while you are here at DBS. Being able to log onto the library website to check the catalogue availability details for the items you want also saves you (and us) a lot of time. Searching the shelves for a book in a library which contains over 50,000 titles over several sites is (to say the least) a not a very productive use of your library time. Learning these basic skills will also help you if you choose to study elsewhere when you have completed your studies at DBS as most academic libraries are multi site and insist that students use the catalogue to independently locate all material.

To help you get to grips with using the catalogue, in addition to print guides and guides on the library website (under 'library guides') we have produced a series of screencast online tutorials which take you through the steps in searching the library catalogue in real time. The guides show you how to perform a basic search, an advanced search and how to renew and reserve books yourself using your library catalogue PIN.

Here is the first part, with parts 2, and 3 to follow. These are also located on the main library site under 'library guides/library catalogues'

Enjoy, and most importantly...learn

Searching the library catalogue, again

What you see and what we see on the library catalogue are pretty much the same. One difference is that we have administrator rights. One of the things administrator rights gives us is the ability to see what students are searching for in the library catalogue. It's not something we look at too often - life's too short after all, but we did look at the search log recently and were a bit surprised by what we found. Many students' searches are better suited to finding journal articles rather than books. This isn't going to work on the library catalogue. In previous years, DBS library staff would enter journal articles onto the library catalogue, in effect creating a mini-electronic resource. The electronic resources we subscribe to now are significantly better than what we had at the time when we entering articles into the catalogue. We can't compete with the multinational corporations who produce these resources and in any case we are better served answering your queries.

Anyway, here are some search tips:

Use the library catalogue to search for books. The best way to search for books, in my experience is to combine the author's surname with a meaningful word from the title, e,g, "mankiw and economics" or "scholes and strategy". If you don't know the author, enter a word from the title or the subject. Search for journals or articles elsewhere

Don't use the library catalogue as you would an electronic resource or even google (or any other search engine). Cataloguing books for the library is quite different to putting data into an electronic resource and generally speaking, we don't enter as much data -just enough to distinguish one book from another.

Keep your queries short. The longer the query, the more chance you will get no results, because there's more chance of making a mistake.

If English is not your first language, have a dictionary at hand. Also, don't use the author's name unless you know how to spell it (Decenzo, Ayckbourn)

Use the advanced search option to be more specific and at the same time, potentially limit the number of results retrieved. For example "depression" will return 102 results. Searching for "Depression" in the title returns 36 hits. Searching for "Depression" in the title and in media "dissertation" returns 6 hits.

There's an excellent guide to searching the library catalogue here