Salutations!

Today’s Topic: EStuff Only, or, No Estuff nohow!...How to clean your Windows!

Continuing from where we left off last week...Some limiting can be done even without using the facets.  Did you know you can tell the catalog up front whether to search ematerials or not?...Read more...

When searching for things in our public catalog, the default is to search "Everything." Like we did in our "hedgehogs" search last week. 

But using the little arrow next to "Everything" you can choose to do a "Catalog Search" to find physical items in our database, or search the "Digital Catalog" to find electronic titles.  You can also pre-apply a library limit based on the library you selected from the opening screen. 

A Catalog Search will filter out digital titles.  It will include any ematerials we have catalogged ourselves (of which there are very, very few). Notice that there are only 205 results of "Hedgehogs" at all libraries instead of the 233 that we got with the Everything search.

A Digital Catalog Search will retrieve only e-titles. We get 28 results. Notice that there isn't the option to limit by Library, or Only Show Available, or any of the other item-specific facets. That's because there aren't any Items attached to e-titles. 

If you choose to pre-limit by library (in this case I chose Brandon as my library), it will search both e-materials and Brandon's physical items. We get 32 results instead of 28.

The options to further limit by Library, Only Show Available, Specific Format, and other facets have re-appeared. 

If we further limit to Specific Format: Book we get 4 resutls:

Which is almost the same as doing an Everything Search, or a Catalog Search, and limiting to Brandon after the fact:

So, if one can get the same results both pre- and post- search, why bother changing from Everything?  Because choosing Catalog, Digital, or Library (Brandon) persists if one continues to search for other things.  Limiting by the facets gets applied after the search, and is only applied to that just-completed search. If, after looking up hedgehogs, you also wanted to look up newts you would have to re-apply all the facets you chose when searching for hedgehogs.  If you choose Catalog you can search for hedgehogs, newts, alpacas, whatever and the Catalog filter will still apply. This comes in handy if you are pulling together a variety of materials for a patron to checkout. 

Also, they do slightly different things:  the search bar option is "Only look in Digital (catalog, Brandon) for hedgehogs." The facets option is "Find hedgehogs, only return ebooks, (Brandon, whatever)."  

While you're at it, don't forget that you can search by Title, Author, Subject, ISBN, Series, Keyword in Subject & Author.  The last 2 are kinda-sorta like the old browse searches. 

Windows 10: Using   + m  is a pretty well known tool to minimize all open windows and get to your desktop...But did you know you can minimize all windows except the one you're working in?  Just grab the title bar of the window you want to keep and shake it.  That's right!  Position your mouse on the title bar and, while holding the left (primary) button, move your mouse quickly back and forth (up/down, right/left--doesn't matter). Hey presto--clutter gone!  Shake it again and all open windows will return.

Share & Enjoy!
Karla