Sunday, November 26, 2006

Lists, Lists, Lists

We've updated all the What's New lists. We're able to present lists which are a lot longer, now that you can browse 50 titles at a time. Even a thousand titles is only 20 clicks.

There's the usual array of seductive things: in nonfiction, a wonderful book about David Hockney, David Hockney: Portraits: and Robert Creeley's last works, taken from the notebook he was working in when he died in 2005, On earth : last poems and an essay ; a well-reviewed biography of William James ; and 600 or so others. In fiction, the good stuff includes Isabel Allende's new novel, Inés of my Soul, which we have ordered in English, large print, audio, and in Spanish ; a new book by Dana Stabenow in the Kate Shugak series ; and Jim Harrrison's new novel, Returning to Earth. New media materials, new Southwest materials, etc.

cover of bookcover of bookcover of bookcover of bookcover of book

We've also tinkered with the media lists, which are always available from the catalog's opening page. The links for DVDs, Books on CD, and Music on CD are now simply catalog searches, and therefore always up to date. Click any time and the catalog will show you--50 at a time--the entire list, including what may have been ordered this morning :-) . These searches are presently limited to exclude the media materials which have been ordered for Southside, since you can't get at them until maybe Valentine's Day. The videos and the books on tape need to have their call number schemes made consistent before a simple search will work, so those are still specially processed data outputs, which are updated only about once a month.

If you log in to your record before you search, you can use the same trick of constructing your own detailed searches, and then save the search as a preferred search (the button will be there when you need it); if you have your search sorted to put the new materials on top and run it every now and again, it will be easy to see if anything new has appeared. Interested in materials "with the subject headings 'climatic change' or 'global warming', no children's materials, published since 2003, sort with most recent on top"? Log in, construct a search, such as the example just described, then save as a preferred search. Run it tomorrow. Run it next month.

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