Finding Materials in the FindIt Catalog

Great introduction

07/15/2009

~ jfilip

I'm relatively new to the Austin Public Library system and having an easy tutorial to show me how to use the catalog system. I'm always a little wary of taking up too much time on the kiosks and this should help me avoid wasting other peoples time!

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Searching FindIt

Hello. I'm a reference librarian at the Faulk Central Library in downtown Austin. In this video, we’ll go over the best ways to search for items using the Austin Public Library’s online catalog. The FindIt Catalog allows you to see what materials the library owns, where they are located, and if they are available for checkout. Searching FindIt can definitely be challenging at times, so we’ll look at the Quick and Advanced Search screens to help you determine which is best for you search. We’ll also go over some basic search tips and tricks to help you locate the items you need quickly.

Quick Search
The library home page provides a link to the FindIt catalog. It is the first button on the menu. The Quick Search screen will appear first. You’ll see that there are three options for searching: Keyword, Browse and Exact. You will normally want to use the Keyword option since it provides the broadest search. Browse works well for authors’ last names and subject searches. Exact is the narrowest search so you will not need to use it very often. It can be helpful with one word titles.

The drop-down menu here allows you to select a certain part of the catalog record to search. The default - Search Everything - will search the entire catalog record. You can also search by author, title, subject, series, and periodical title. You can also filter your results by choosing a specific library location or part of town. The material format menu lets you limit your search to just DVDs, CDs, or other formats. Click the checkbox for ebooks if you want to limit your search to online books.

The best way to find an item is by entering the title and the author’s name. For instance, we want to find the novel “Next” by Michael Crichton. If we just typed in the word “next” (no quotes) and choose title, we would get hundreds of hits. If we enter “next and Crichton,” then we go directly to that title. Notice that when we are searching two different fields (title and author) we have to search using the “Search Everything” option. Limiting to “Title” or “Author” would not make sense for this search since we are searching both fields.

Boolean Operators
Also notice that we used the word AND between next and Crichton. The words AND, OR, and NOT allow you to combine keywords for more complex searches. These words are called Boolean operators. AND indicates that you want to find both words in the record, like in our search for Crichton and next. OR means you would be happy with any of the keywords you’ve entered (for instance paris or france). NOT indicates that you’d like to exclude some words. This would work if you wanted to find books on England NOT new England.

The title and author search also works for DVDs and CDs. You would just enter a director, performer, or musician’s name instead of an author.

Precise Phrase Searching
There will be times when you only know a title or portion of a title. To limit the number of hits, use a precise phrase search by putting single quotation marks around the title. This way you will only get the records with that exact phrase. If you do not use the quotes, the catalog will return records with any combination of those words in the title. For instance, body art without quotes returns 22 titles, while ‘body art’ brings up only 12.

Stopwords
Another tricky thing about FindIt is that it will ignore some commonly used words like AND, THE, BUT, NOT, and ON among others. If you are not able to find the title you want and it includes a stopword, you will need to put that word in double quotes. For instance, the book “he’s just not that into you” will not come up unless you put the word “NOT” in double quotes.

Substitution and Truncation
FindIt is not forgiving with misspellings, so it’s important to be accurate. However, you can cheat a bit. Let’s say you know the author’s last name is Grey buy you’re not sure if it’s with an E or an A. You can use a question mark in that spot to search for either spelling: Gr?y.

Another trick is to search with just the beginning of a word. Truncating the word with a $ allows you to search for the different forms of a word. For instance, child$ will bring up child, childs or children. Theat$ will bring up theater, theatre, or theatrical.

Advanced Search Screen
There are times when the Basic Search screen just doesn’t work as effectively. The Advanced Search screen offers many more options for searching. Notice that you have multiple search boxes so you can search on several different fields at the same time using Boolean operators. Scroll down to see additional limiters including age level, language, publication year, and more detailed format menu.

For instance, let’s say we want to find a Grimm’s fairy tale book in Spanish written for children. We would enter “fairy tales” in the first box and choose “subject.” Then “grimm” for “author.” Scroll down and choose “Primary – J” for “Age level” and then “Spanish" for the language. This search provides eight titles. The quick search would only allow you to search for “Grimm” and “fairy tales,” which would give you 41 titles to comb through.

Format Browsing
Finally, many people would like to be able to see a list of our DVD, CD, or magazine collections. You can do this using the Quick Search screen and the format menu. Simply choose “Videorecording on DVD” from the menu. The library owns thousands of DVDs, so for this search it is best to choose a single location to browse. We’ll choose “Manchaca.” If you find that you still have too many, you can refine your search by clicking the link at the top right of the results page. This allows you to use many of the same filters we saw on the Advanced Search screen. We can choose only recent movies by typing “2009” in the publication year. You can do the same type of search for any of the formats listed in the format menu. Just leave the search box empty to browse everything we own.

This lesson has provided an overview of some of the most common types of searches. However, you can find more search tips in the Catalog FAQs. A link can be found in the upper right-hand corner of the FindIt screen. Also feel free to contact us using the Ask a Librarian link. We’re available by phone, chat, or email during regular library hours.

Thanks for watching!