Friday, January 13, 2006

The Catalog We All Want

The North Carolina State University Libraries have a brand new online catalog with a lot of neat features. Some of my favorites:
  • It has the option of limiting out government documents in the advanced search. Gov docs are such a problem in my library's catalog, and I would LOVE to have an option like this one!
  • Like Google, it offers spelling suggestions or automatically corrects the misspelled word. Sometimes these corrections are incorrect though. I entered "autims" and it was corrected to "atoms" when I was really going for "autism".
  • It provides LC Call Number ranges for the items in your search results. So, for the books on autism, you can click through and find that a large number are located in the range: "RJ370 - RJ550 Diseases of children and adolescents". Then you can just go browse that section!
  • The results list gives you all the important information - title, author, date of publication, format, call number, location (with the numbers of the floors!), and whether or not the item is available.
  • Clustering - Your results are organized into various subjects (topics, regions, eras), genres, formats, libraries, languages, and authors.
  • Allows you to sort by relevance and by most popular, in addition to other common methods of sorting.
Definitely worth checking out!

I'm just going to sit here and wish my library's catalog did all that.

[Found on ACRLog]

5 comments:

Jeff said...

hey kat -- i have another beef with firefox, which i'm still using, though i have no idea why. on some (but not all) web pages, all the apostrophes are replaced with question marks inside a black diamond. never had this problem with IE. is there a plugin or something to get rid of this?

Kate said...

Hey Nye!, I don't know how you find some of these problems. :) I have never seen nor heard of the question mark inside a black diamond thing before, so I can't help you with that one. I will have to admit that there are still some web pages that are not compatible with Firefox, unfortunately, but that seems to be getting much rarer.

But, if you are looking for another reason Firefox is great, try the Adblock Add-On. If you right click over an ad on your screen, you can block it and not have to see that ad again. Of course, this does not work for all those obnoxious flash ads, but it still is a nice feature.

Jeff said...

Try this page -- every time you see the word "Section's," there is a question mark instead of an apostrophe.

The adblock add-on is good though.

Kate said...

Nye! Well, I'm a bit late getting back to you. I tried that page and it looks normal on my end.

I had found a solution, and had posted about it right after I posted my last comment. For some bizarre reason, it did not show up.

Okay, I found it again - Check out this post at Totem to Temple. Hopefully that will solve the problem.

Jeff said...

what on Earth would i do without you?