We’ve made some changes to Library Hub Discover which we hope will enhance your experience of using the service:
Display options change
We’ve made it possible to change the way that records are displayed on the search results screen. You can now toggle between expanded and collapsed views, by using the button in the top left. This should allow for quicker scanning through large result sets. Your choice of display will be used for subsequent searches until you change it. This information is held in our session cookie, so if you disable or delete cookies the display will revert to the default expanded view.
When in collapsed view, clicking on the arrow next to the number of libraries will show all the holding libraries for that document; it will not display the cover image or publication details which you see in the expanded result view.
Google books links
Where available, links to Google Books previews will now appear in full records, next to the cover image. Items may have full, limited, or no Google preview available, and this information will be found in the record display.
You may also disable the Google preview links. If you choose to disable the Google preview it will remain disabled for all future searches. This information is held in our session cookie, so if you disable cookies your preference will not be retained.
Indexing improvements
We’ve made some changes to the way data is indexed to improve accuracy when searching for items in a particular format (print, electronic etc) that are held at a particular library. The document format is now indexed at the level of the individual library. This means that if you search for online materials at the University of Bradford you will only find records where it is Bradford that has access to the online resource, regardless of the formats in which the other libraries in the record may hold that same document.
In the image above, this result would be found by a search for ‘Bradford’ plus ‘electronic’, but not for ‘Bradford’ plus ‘print’ or ‘Cambridge’ plus ‘electronic’.
In the past there was little variation in the format of materials between different libraries, so the document format was recorded for each merged record as a whole. This meant that a Discover record might have been indexed with two formats (print, online) even though an individual library might only have held that document in one of those formats (eg. print). This resulted in inaccuracies when searching for a specific library’s copy of a document in your preferred format, so the index changes now resolve this problem and improve accuracy. We hope that this change will be especially helpful for users of the Compare service.
Note that the variability of the data can mean it is sometimes challenging to correctly identify the document format(s) in a record. So if format is crucial to your search it is worth checking the holdings display for a library, as the location information should help to confirm the format(s) held.
