Resource Management - Search Bar Examples

Owned by Jennifer Koerber (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Feb 02, 2019
4 min read

Note: This was originally one video split into two to upload to the wiki.

 

Searching Using the Persistent Search Bar

In this video, we’ll review Resource Management-related searching from the search bar, the main menu, and within the Metadata Editor. The Cataloging module will go into more detail on working in the Metadata Editor; in this video, we’ll focus on searches that most staff can perform.

First, let’s look at searches you can perform from the persistent search bar.

Looking for Resources

You can use any of the materials search types – All Titles; Physical Titles or Items; Electronic Titles, Portfolios, and Collections – and either the basic or advanced search to look for records, but let’s look at types and criteria that might be particularly useful to catalogers and inventory management staff.

In the basic search options, you can search for All Titles, Physical Titles, or Physical Items records by:

  • Common fields like Title, Creator, Publisher, Keywords, etc.
  • You can search by different Notes fields on the Title, Item, or Holdings record
  • A variety of Subject vocabularies and standard numbers
  • Some Dublin Core fields

For Electronic Titles, Collections, and Portfolios, you can also search by:

  • Access rights
  • Interface name
  • License information

Once you expand the Advanced Search form, you have access to many more criteria for each search type and may be provided with suggested terms via drop-down menus. There are too many to describe them all here, but if you conduct any search, you can click on the Get Help for This Page option under the Help icon and review the list of search field descriptions with detailed information, including the field or fields the criteria searches.

One note about advanced search for materials records: You can combine information from the Title, Holdings, and Physical Item records for physical materials, and for the Title, Collection, and Portfolio levels for electronic materials. Click on the title bar for each section to scroll through all the criteria that are available or type in the box at the top to find one quickly.

A few of the more cataloging-related criteria include:

For all materials records (Physical and Electronic):

Brief Level: this is a Harvard-defined list of how robust the cataloging is for any given record. If you want to see what records have very brief cataloging, you can search for a Brief level of 01: Lowest or go higher for more robust cataloging. Brief Level records are configured by ITS and will be used to identify a wide variety of issues with records. Brief Level records do not mean the same thing as Encoding Level – you can see Enc here – although Encoding Level might be used in the configuration for the brief level.

Material Type and Resource Type:

  • Material types are the large categories of format that we’re used to: Book, Journal, Music, Visual Material, Mixed Material, etc.
  • Resource type supplements that with more specific descriptors pulled from the LDR and 008 fields, such as Atlas, Audio musical and Audio nonmusical, Book, Digital files, Journal, Articles, Manuscripts, Microforms and many others.
  • Finally, there is a Granular Resource Type, which allows you to enter a keyword search and this will search the 008, position 21 field.
  • For Material Types and Resource Types, you do get a “not equals” operator, which allows you to exclude a material type from your search. So, I don’t want it to be a Map, for instance.

Another excellent advanced search choice is the Local Fields. In the basic search, all you get is the Local field 900 for Aleph number. In the advanced search, you get other local fields for other location information and local subjects. You get this at the title level and the holdings level.

There is an easy way to find bibliographic records in particular that have no holdings and/or items attached. At the title level, you can choose Has Inventory – Equals – No, so you can find bibliographic records that have no holdings or items attached. For holdings, [Has Items – Equals – No] will find you bibliographic records that have no items attached to their holdings records; they may have holdings records, but they will have no items attached to them.

For Electronic Materials Records

Two additional criteria are the Activation date (or activation information) and Is Linked options. Activation date is what it is, and Is Linked will allow you to find eResources that are linked to records in the Community Zone.

We strongly suggest spending time scrolling through the advanced search criteria for different materials types to imagine what kinds of searches they help you construct.

Looking for Authority Records

Meanwhile, the last search type will look at one for Authority records. This will search the Community Zone – and you can see it switched right to it – and that is a collection of records managed by Ex Libris and shared by all Alma institutions. You can’t edit authority records in Alma, but you can use them to verify information, confirm that an authority record exists, or to see all bibliographic records related to a particular authority record by clicking on Search bibliographic records matching this value. For more on authority records and the Community Zone, please watch the Community Zone segment of this module.