Searching the OPAC through the Library Web Page
Enter the item title in the 'Find books (and more)' field. If you have entered the title exactly as it appears in the cataloguing record, and a Novanet library has a copy, you should be taken directly to the item's record. Most often, it will take you to a list of possibilities, a portion of which looks like this:
Though we entered the exact title, and though the Catalogue search engine was able to turn up this book, it found many more items that are possible matches. Ours, the correct title, is the 49th book listed.
To find the reason why, go back to the first page of the search results. The system tells you that your results are sorted first by year, then by author, rather than on accuracy of the title entered:
It placed a premium on currency (Sorted by: Year), then on accuracy. Our book, published in 2002, falls well behind other, more recently published items. After the year, the items are sorted by author.
- If this is what you are looking for in your search, this is a fine approach. This way, you can discover other items relevant to your research that you may not have otherwise found.
If you want to refine your search, go back to the OPAC home page, the first page presented in this section.
Begin with the second tier of tabs, on the left-hand side:
The 'Search' tab allows you to make a simple search, using one of the basic search parameters:
- Keyword, author, title, or subject; or as a browse of matches in several 'tagged' fields:
- Title, author, subjects (but not medical subjects), the seldom used ISBN or ISSN (book- specific and serial-specific identifying codes), and call number.
Go back to our first example, and enter the same search term:
- Highlight 'Titles' to identify the search type, enter the title, and select 'Go'.
Here is the list of closely matching results, in which our item is the second displayed:
Click on this item, and you see:
As stated above, there is just one match (depending on the existence of several editions, there could be several matches for the same item), and there are two copies, one at St. FX and one at SMU. If you click on the title, you will see a more complete bibliographic record:
This is one of three possible views:
From this record, you can:
- the full record
- a brief record
- the 'behind-the-scenes' Machine Readable Catalogue (MARC) record
From this record, you can:
- Sometimes see the table of contents of the item in the 'Contents' section.
- You can travel easily between linked records.
- You can, for instance, select the author and find all of her works in the Novanet Catalogue.
- You can select one of the subject headings, and be given a new list of all the books which share the same subject headings, assigned by the Cataloguers.
Go back and click on the 'Saint Mary's University' in the 'Owned by' column:
You will see some information on SMU's copy:
- The item's barcode
- The call number
- The due date (or in this case, it is in the Library)
- The item's status (our general collection for this item)
- Two possible actions: placing a hold (or a Novanet Express request) for the item, or requesting a photocopy of a chapter of the item.
For complete information on Holds, go to the "Holds and Recalls" section of the manual (Chapter 12).
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