Lunch & Learn: Nancy Pressman-Levy and Jeremy Darrington on Searchit@PUL

In this ses­sion, Nancy Pressman-Levy and Jeremy Dar­ring­ton talked about the fea­tures of Prince­ton Library’s tool for dis­cov­er­ing and access­ing schol­arly resources pro­vided by the library, avail­able at http://searchit.princeton.edu. Searchit@PUL

Dar­ring­ton dis­cussed Books+, which helps patrons to find books,  jour­nals, elec­tronic resources, CDs, DVDs, and maps. In the data­base, there are about 10 mil­lion items. While it does not allow for full text search, it has all the items of the main cat­a­log but also senior the­ses, locally dig­i­tized images, and spe­cial collections.

He then went on to show Arti­cles+, which has jour­nal and mag­a­zine arti­cles, news­pa­per arti­cles, dis­ser­ta­tions, book reviews, stream­ing video and audio. This data­base has 600 mil­lion items, mostly news­pa­per arti­cles and schol­arly jour­nal arti­cles. This ser­vice does allow for full-text searching.

In demon­stra­tions of SearchIt@PUL by both Dar­ring­ton and Pressman-Levy, we saw how searches on “tor­ture” or “pol­i­tics” give thou­sands of results, which might be ini­tially unwieldy for schol­ars, but by apply­ing fil­ters, one may limit the results to books, jour­nals, video, man­u­scripts, sev­eral lan­guages, cre­ation date, or sub­ject. One can then sort results by rel­e­vance, date, and author.

A click into the full record for an item shows use­ful meta­data and full details about the item. Click­ing on loca­tions and avail­abil­ity tells you the exact loca­tion of an item in on-campus sites, such as Fire­stone Library, or ReCAP, which the Library uses for off­site stor­age (http://recap.princeton.edu/about/virtual_tour/). There are links back to the main orig­i­nal cat­a­log record as well, and links out to Google Books for more infor­ma­tion about each item.

There are bib­li­o­graphic tools in the sys­tems as well, where you can mark records, then go to eshelf, then email them to your­self or export to End­note or Ref­works. Schol­ars can even do a search, then set up an alert to track issues. For the entire set of fea­tures that Dar­ring­ton and Pressman-Levy went over in their demon­stra­tions, please watch the video below.

Video Man­age­ment, Video Host­ing, Video Stream­ing, Video Plat­form