Course corrections

As retired MLB pitcher Tim Hudson once said, “There’s more than one way to do things. There’s always different points of views and styles of pitching.” Baseball season is back again, with new and eager hopefuls starting in Spring Training, familiar faces returning to rosters, and the shuffle of big money trade deals adding a 2019 perspective to the new season. Here at the library, we’re upping our game as well, and we want to share a small but mighty new feature in our online catalog, BiblioCommons.

Now, right from your account, as you search the library’s collections online, we’ve opened new paths so that you can do a quick click and also search for downloadable audiobooks, music, comics and eBooks from hoopla, streaming films from Kanopy, and an additional selection of documentary films offered in our Access Video on Demand website.

You won’t find the individual titles from the three services above in our catalog listings (note: we DO list OverDrive eBooks and audiobooks and RBDigital eBooks, audiobooks and magazines in search results along with the titles from our collections found in our building), but we hope you’ll try out the instructions below to quickly and easily search for additional streaming films, audiobooks, music, comics and eBooks.

“Didn’t find what you’re looking for?” is a new feature to lead cardholders to discover resources and services offered by the library from a regular keyword search.  We’ve set up convenient BiblioCommons links which will search our digital collections from hoopla (audiobooks, music, comics, eBooks) and Kanopy (streaming films), and we also offer a quick click link in BiblioCommons to Access Video on Demand streaming films.

You’ll see this new feature to discover more resources in three places:

  • In the search header (top above the red line above the search results “Search other resources” link)
  • At the end of every page of search results
  • On the ‘No results found’ search page

Let’s take a look at the top “Search other resources” link. The example below shows a search for “dog” in BiblioCommons.

Notice the blue link above the number of search results.

Click “Search other resources” to open a drop-down menu.

Choose Hoopla to search more audiobooks, eBooks, comics and music for the topic “dog”.

Choose Kanopy to search  streaming films for the topic “dog”.

Choose Access Video on Demand to open up our Princeton database of documentary films, where you can specify “dog” in the search box within this database.

No separate web pages to open and no apps required! This can all be done right from your search results. The key is to look for the blue “Search other resources” link and be sure to click it open.

Also, at the end of every page of search results in BiblioCommons, if you scroll down, you’ll see “Didn’t find what you’re looking for?” with a handy and powerful blue link, “Discover more services and resources.”

The menu shown opens up to reveal links to search hoopla and Kanopy directly, and to get right to Access Video on Demand.

Again, no separate web pages to open, and no apps required, as this can all be done right from your search results. Just look for the blue “Discover more services and resources” link and click it open.

Our online catalog is constantly upgraded as BiblioCommons developers add new functions and work toward better mobile and accessibility design. These streamlined ways to quickly search downloadable content directly from the catalog without going separately to the hoopla, Kanopy or Access Video on Demand websites/apps will give you new points of view and access to search some of our online eLibrary resources that you won’t find detailed in our collections searches.

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