Friends of the Libraries - Lecture and Garden Tour

The Friends of the UVic Libraries presents

Bringing New Life to Old Gardens
Lecture and Garden Tour/Tea with renowned garden historian Cyril Hume

Lecture: Wednesday August 9th, 2006
Time: 7:30p.m.
David Lam Auditorium, MacLaurin Building, UVic
Ticket price: $10

Garden Tour/Tea: Saturday August 12th, 2006
Time: 2:30-4:30p.m.
686 Mountjoy Ave., and 535 Island St., Oak Bay
Ticket price: $15

Lecture and Garden Tour/Tea ticket price: $20

Follow the link below to learn more about this upcoming event:
http://gateway.uvic.ca/lib/admin/friends/events.html

Mearns Centre Construction begins

Activity at the Mearns Centre for Learning construction site is about to increase. Demolition exploration work on the northeast section of the McPherson Library building will commence Monday, July 24th. Excavation is scheduled to start at the end of the July with concrete foundation work commencing early September. For more information go to http://www.uvic.ca/construction/

Online Catalogue Has Changed... Have a Look!

Our online catalogue (http://gateway.uvic.ca/top/main.html) has changed. Have a look!

In early June, we upgraded the software that runs our Libraries Integrated Library System. This gave us the opportunity to include several changes and enhancements to the online catalogue. Many of the changes that you see in the catalogue are the results of feedback we received from our Libraries Website survey done in February 2006.

Here are the major changes that you can now see:

1. The default search in the Main Catalogue has been changed to “Keyword anywhere” rather than “Title”. This search provides a way for the novice user to throw in a few words and get some results quickly. In most cases, the user will rarely get the message “Your search resulted in no hits”. Results are then sorted by a relevancy formula that “brings the good stuff to the top”.

2. “Keyword (with boolean)” allows the user to search using the connectors and/or/not and to construct more complex searches. This search type is now the second option.

3. “Author keyword” and “Subject keyword” allow users to search keywords in author headings and subject headings without having to guess the correct author heading or Library of Congress subject heading. There is more chance for success.

4. Call number searching is much faster than it used to be.

5. Items now have links to both Open Worldcat and Amazon. Both of these services provide users with additional information about an item, such as table of contents, chapter headings, book reviews and more. Users will be able to tell whether a particular book is really the one that they want.

6. Our library system is now “Unicode compliant”. This greatly improves the display of non-Roman characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Displays of records in other languages which use special diacritics for their romanized transliterated forms, such as Arabic and Hebrew, are also improved. If you want to see what this looks like, try a “Title begins with” search: Zhongguo zheng zhi si xiang shi

7. The results list displays the format of the item in the right-hand column. Users will be able to tell at a glance whether an item is a book, journal, video, CD etc.

8. The ability to limit a search is now more visible (no drop down menus) and will offer a way to quickly narrow a search. We have added three new limits – 2000- (for very recent material), Music scores, and CD’s/Vinyl. Do a keyword search on “greatest hits” and limit to CD’s/Vinyl. You will be surprised!!

9. New search examples are included at the bottom of the Basic search page with a link to more tips and search examples. http://gateway.uvic.ca/top/more.html

10. Coming soon: Call numbers will be linked to location maps so that a user will immediately know on which floor that item is located.

Comments? Send your comments about these changes/enhancements to http://uviclib.uvic.ca/top/site_feedback.html Thanks!