Salutations!

Today’s Topic: Why can't I find that title I just withdrew? And other search tips.

You are weeding and withdraw your copy of "The Most Useless Book Ever" along with some others.  But, you get curious--how many times did it actually circulate?--and go to look it up again. You open Item Search in WorkFlows and browse for "Most Useless" and nothing comes up.  What gives??   Read More...

Items that are checkedout to your Withdrawn user are shadowed. This is new-ish.  Sometime in the last few years, we talked about this at an ALL-WALS mtg and consensus was that patrons didn't want to have to wade through items and titles that they couldn't get, so we decided to shadow them from the catalog.  After all, they were still findable for staff in WorkFlows, right?  Right!!

However, frequently the item isn't Browse searchable in WorkFlows. Sometimes it is just a matter of minutes(just like newly added items sometimes don't appear immediately), sometimes it needs overnight reports to run, sometimes it seems completely random(altho' I'm sure there's a reason hidden somewhere).  Or, maybe you get the lovely "Heading keys need to be indexed first" error. This is when switching to a Keyword Search can help. 

Whether you use Title for your index, or General, or something else, Keyword Searches for materials (like patron searches) require correct spelling of entire words--no searching for just "most use"--unless you use special truncation symbols.  But you can search words in any order. For example, "most useless" and "useless most" will both find your Most Useless Book Ever. 

You can also search by Item ID--even if the item is shadowed. You just need to remember to change the Index. WF will change the Search Type to Exact automatically.

When doing a keyword search in WorkFlows you can use the General Index with special connecting terms (AKA "boolean operators") of "AND", "OR", and "NOT" to combine fields. Like "Useless AND Dull."

Bottom Line: If you are having difficulty finding a title in WorkFlows, try different types of searches. Or, as my Dad always used to say: "If at first you don't succeed; try, try again!"

If you want more details and more options for more intricate searches, here's a link to more!

That's it for this week...

Share & Enjoy!
Karla