Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Browse by popular format on Keys

(by Heather Hernandez, Technical Services Librarian)

We've added a new pull down menu to the main page of the Keys Catalog--the ability to browse by popular format:

Screenshot of the Keys Catalog highlighting the new search feature
With this tool you can quickly retrieve all the archives, books, games, maps, musical CDs, musical scores, online resources, videos on DVD or videos on VHS in the Library.

To accomplish this, we moved the links to other catalogs; you'll find them under the "Other catalogs" link on the left side of the screen.

Interested in how we did it?  Keep reading!  Not interested?  Just click over to the Keys Catalog and enjoy the new feature!

Nicole Engard recently posted to the ByWater Solutions blog about creating a new items pull down menu, and for us, a light bulb went off!  As anyone who has gone to our Advanced Search screen has seen, we have a lot of item types.  Why so many?  Because we use the ability to search by item type for back room operations such as preservation surveys--for this, it makes a great deal of difference whether a sea shanty recording is on audio cassette, CD, or a vinyl record.

But the ability to retrieve in one search the most popular formats seemed lost in the huge sea of item types under Advanced Search, until we saw Nicole's blog post.  I was able to easily adapt her HTML to the formats that users ask us about searching the most, and then plug that into the OpacMainUserBlock preference of the OPAC global settings.  Be sure to let us know what you think of the new search tool!

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