Changes to Catalog, home page, and other discovery tools

Our recent release of our Library Catalog features a new look and feel, new coordinated discovery elements, a new Journals category, a change in the default search scope, and a tweak to the search prompt.

Note that for the most part, these changes do not impact how you use the Library Catalog.

A new look and feel

This release incorporates design elements from the University Communications branding guidelines.  In addition, we have cleaned up the banner and navigation components, and removed some of the side elements to all pages in order to improve readability.

Coordinated discovery

The release introduces the first two elements of coordinated discovery:  clear display of the major resource discovery categories and forwarding searches from one category to the next.  What’s a discovery category?  A discovery category is a pool of resources that can be searched and that are given a distinct treatment.  The catalog is a discovery category containing records for print and electronic resources.  The databases category provides its own subject browsing feature.  Articles and Journal are in their own categories.

• Category navigation:  To the right of the UW crest, “Search”, and the Library name, we show the major discovery categories and indicate which category is the current search context with a blue line under the category name.
• Search forwarding:  If you search in one category, then click on the category navigation link to another category, we forward your search to the new category and execute it there.

A third element of coordinated discovery, the suggestion service, will be released later this summer.

See Coordinated Discovery for a longer description of this discovery strategy.

Journals category

The new journals category includes all serials bibliographic records.  The data are the same as in the catalog category, but the search is constrained to serials, thus shortening the path to very commonly sought resources.

Articles category

The articles category is delivered through Primo, presented with its new user interface.  Only very simple branding has been applied—the paint there isn’t yet dry.

Default search scope

With this release, we now default to UW System search scope for print resources but exclude electronic resources not available to UW-Madison affiliates.  We provide links to either constrain the search scope to only resources at Madison, or to expand the search scope to all UW System resources, including those that cannot be accessed through UW-Madison.

The search prompt

We have refined the search prompt to make the type of of search more prominent by adding prepositions to the prompt and moving the search type select menu/dropdown to left of the search input box.  Animating the search button draws the patrons attention to what to press to submit the search.