Reference at Newman Library

Tag: OneSearch

OneSearch Issue with Content in Search Results We Don’t Really Have [UPDATED]

[SEE UPDATE BELOW]
If you find an ebook in the search results that it looks like we don’t really have access to, chalk it up to a known issue that first surfaced a few weeks ago. As noted on the “Known Issues” page of the Support @ OLS website:

PCI “ghost” activations: For the past few weeks resources have shown up in Primo searches that are *not* activated in the Primo Central Index. Several schools have reported this problem, and it appears to happen most frequently with ciando eBooks. Other collections that show up are: Credo, Dandy Booksellers, Bridgeman Education, several Oxford University Press collections.

Here’s an example of book you can find in OneSearch from some ebook collection (“ciando eBooks”) that we don’t actually have here at Baruch. If click on the Details tab and scroll down to the bottom of the record, you can see where this ebook record came from:

OneSearch--ebook record from ciando eBooks

If you find one of these, please let Mike or me know so we can report it to CUNY OLS.

UPDATE 8 July 2015: The ghost content that we didn’t really have access to is no longer showing up in search results.

OneSearch: The New Way to Find Physical Items on Reserve

Monique Prince has news detailing a new, improved way to find print books and other physical items on reserve:

OneSearch now offers the opportunity to search for course reserve textbooks in a variety of ways, including by discipline, course number, faculty name, and book title. From the OneSearch interface, users can select “Reserves” to narrow their search to Reserve textbooks at Baruch. Typing in a course number or faculty name initiates a keyword search to get started, and then there are options on the left of the screen which enables you to narrow your search for more precise results.

Click on “Details” to identify the course number if that is unknown. Click on see whether it is available to borrow (it is, if you see “Available” and under “Status” you see “Look on Shelf”).

One great new feature is the “Browse Shelf” capability, which looks for books at Baruch with similar call numbers. This is especially helpful if students would be interested in an older edition of the book, located in the stacks and available for an extended loan. It can also be helpful if you want to see what other books with similar subjects might be available.

Hopefully this will be a helpful way of assisting students to see exactly what is on reserve for their course. Keep in mind that there is a difference between general course textbooks and textbooks that are reserved for a specific professor’s course. So, if Intermediate Accounting is used by multiple sections of ACC 3000, you will not also find it listed by searching for a professor’s name unless they specifically requested it. You could find it by doing a keyword search for the discipline, course number, or book title.

OneSearch Excels at Finding Book Reviews

While working on a research guide for the 2015-2016 freshman text (Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves), I discovered that OneSearch does a much better job of finding book reviews than the database that is supposedly specialized for this task: Book Review Digest Plus. OneSearch found the same 8 reviews that Book Review Digest has but also located dozens more, including one from a scholarly journal. From now on, OneSearch is going to be my starting point for locating book reviews.

Problem with OneSearch on Library Home Page

UPDATE 13 May 2015 5:00 pm: This problem is now fixed.

 

If you run a search in OneSearch using the yellow search bar on the library website, you’ll get an error on the search results page that says “An unexpected error has occured” and looks like this:

OneSearch--error message after widget search

 

If you re-run the search within the OneSearch interface, it’ll be fine. The CUNY Office of Library Service is looking into this problem with search widgets embedded in library web pages.

Maintenance Work to Affect Catalog and OneSearch

Between 7 am and 11:30 am this Friday (April 3), the library catalog and OneSearch will be affected in different ways by planned maintenance work by CUNY CIS:

  • library catalog
    • entirely unavailable
  • OneSearch
    • searches can be run but there will be no way to log in (using library ID number) to see full search results when off campus (but you can still click through the “View Online” tab on or off campus to view the full text of those items your search does find)
    • real-time availability messages for items we own (e.g., books that can be borrowed) will not display

Remote access to library databases (handled through our EZproxy server) will be unaffected by this work.