When we converted the catalog from the old software to this new one, we found a lot of consistency issues in abbreviations (MHGS vs Midwest Historical & Genealogical Society), author names (Smith, Albert vs Smith, A.) and subject headings (marriages vs marriage records.)\u00a0 This makes some of the cool features of our new system less effective.\u00a0 We\u2019re working to clean things up, but with more than 10,000 records, it\u2019s going to take some time.\u00a0 In the meantime, what you can do with the catalog depends a little on what you\u2019re searching for.<\/p>\n
If you do a search for something Kansas-related, such as Kansas Sedgwick County<\/em>, you\u2019ll see several ways to refine your search in the left column of the search result page \u2013 you\u2019ll see Authors, Item Types, Locations (where in the library), Places (where in the world), and Topics.\u00a0 These are called facets and work pretty much like similar columns on amazon.com or other big websites with search functions.\u00a0 If you click on Land Records under Topics, you\u2019ll just see books that have been cataloged with Land Records in the subject headings.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t mean, of course, that these are the only Sedgwick County books that mention land records; these are just the books that a) have land records as a significant topic and b) have been entered that way in the catalog.<\/p>\n If a set of records, say the results of a search for Ohio<\/em>, haven\u2019t yet been cleaned up, you will only see Authors, Item Types and Locations in the left column.\u00a0 The search will still look at subject headings for these books, but they don\u2019t show up in the facets yet.\u00a0 If you want to see if there are any books that focus on Ohio land records, you will need to do a search for Ohio land records. <\/em><\/p>\n You can tell a book\u2019s records have been cleaned up if the subject headings are in upper and lower case \u2013 our old system had a thing for subject headings in ALL CAPS!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When we converted the catalog from the old software to this new one, we found a lot of consistency issues in abbreviations (MHGS vs Midwest Historical & Genealogical Society), author names (Smith, Albert vs Smith, A.) and subject headings (marriages vs marriage records.)\u00a0 This makes some of the cool features of our new system less … Continue reading More Library Catalog Search Tips<\/span>