Search all the National Library… and more

The National Library of Australia has announced its new “Single Business Discovery Service” in Beta mode. Despite the wordy name this is a single easy access point to a variety of Australian catalogues, directories and collections. For this initial version there are a range of data sources including: the Australian National Bibliographic Database, Australian Newspapers, Picture Australia, the ARROW Discovery Service, and Pandora. The new service also provides the discovery interface for the People Australia initiative and some external sources of data such as OAIster, Open Library, the Hathi Trust, the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress tables of contents, publishers’ descriptions and sample book chapters.
This is set to be really useful, so if you have any suggestions or comments please make them – so iwe get the best service possible!

To have a look, a play, and to use it – http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/

 

New books alert

To find new books in the QUT Library collection go to the Recently added titles page. You can click on Humanities or any other faculty or school to see what has come in. You can even get an RSS feed so you can be notified when new titles arrive.

To get to the page click on More in the About the Library section of the Library Home Page and then choose Recently Added Titles… or just click on this URL – http://www.library.qut.edu.au/about/recentlyaddedtitles.jsp

To find out more about RSS you might enjoy the RSS in Plain English video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU .

 

Searching for Journals

You can now search for journals from the library homepage. From the Quick Catalogue search on the left hand side, click on the drop down menu. This will find all journals held at QUT and link to the fulltext of those that we get electronically.

For more assistance with finding journal articles/conference papers/electronic newspapers etc., go to http://www.library.qut.edu.au/learn/type/journalarticles.jsp

 

Language Limit on Catalogue searches

You can now limit your searches by language in the Library Catalogue, including French, German, Chinese and more.

 

The language limit is available from the following catalogue pages:

• Advanced search page (for keyword searching), or
• by selecting the “Limit or sort your results button” when browse searching

 

Spell checker on the catalogue

The library catalogue how has spell checking functionality, which offers a “best guess” suggestion if a patron mis-spells a word (eg. “metalurgy” will suggest “metallurgy”). If more than one spelling suggestion is available the catalogue will also provide a “more suggestions” link, which the patron can then use to see a range of suggested words.

Note, the Spell Check feature only works if no results are returned from a keyword search. It doesn’t offer alternative suggestions for author, title or subject searches.
While it is not a perfect solution or as sophisticated as Google’s ‘Did you mean’ feature, it is still an improvement for our clients.
To check out this feature try searching on metalurgy or humn rsource management