For the past few years, we have heard from many of you about the things you want our online catalog to do. Searching should be as easy and intuitive as possible. You’d like the option to browse our collections and see a list of every movie we have, or every item we’ve added recently. You want to be able to create and save booklists. Most of all, you want to log in once and have the catalog remember that you’re logged in when you want to place things on hold. It’s definitely time for us to take our online catalog to the next level.
We’re excited to present to you the beta version of our new online catalog, and we invite you to try it out and tell us what you think before we launch it in early April.
- Your Library Account – Unlike Aquabrowser, which had no connections to your library account, this new catalog is fully integrated with your account. Once you log in, you’ll be able to see and manage your checkouts, holds, fines, profile information, and booklists, and you’ll stay logged in until you choose to log out (or your session times out).
- Easily Filter Your Results - After you enter your search terms, you will be able to narrow down your results by clicking on the various facets of the results. You can easily view all items from a particular branch, in DVD format, or in a particular language!
- Browse Our Catalog –You can easily view all items from a particular branch, author, topic, genre or patron generated tags!
- Save and Share – You can easily bookmark or send links to items in our catalog, with links that never expire. Email items (or whole searches) to yourself, send them as text messages, or build RSS feeds. Use Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ to tell your friends what you’re reading now.
- Create Booklists – Once you are logged into your library account, you can search the catalog and save any items that strike your fancy. Your booklists will be private – only you can view them – and you can set up as many as you want or need. Add private notes to the items you’ve saved. Keep a list of what you’ve already read, or what you want to read next.
- Tag Our Books – When you’re logged in, you can add tags to any record. Anyone can search or browse the tags that have been added. Tag our Victorian-era books as “steampunk” or tag all the DVDs by your favorite comedian as “comedy gold” and make our stuff easier to find!
The beta catalog will be available through the month of March. During this time, we invite you to try some searches, log into your library account, make a booklist, or experiment in whatever way you like. We’re also encouraging you to give us your feedback – you can comment on this blog post or send us your comments directly. We will gather your suggestions, make adjustments, and fix any bugs that turn up. In early April, we will retire our Aquabrowser discovery layer and replace it with this new catalog.
Thanks for checking out our beta, and happy searching!
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