University of Pittsburgh Library System Announces New and Improved Online Catalog-PITTCat+
PITTSBURGH-Searching for a historic photo of 19th-century downtown Pittsburgh? While looking for a book, would you like to see an image of the cover, its table of contents, as well as the full text? Do you want to be notified by Pitt libraries when selections of interest come in? All of this is possible for the Pitt community and people worldwide with the University Library System's new online catalog, called PITTCat+ (http://pittcatplus.pitt.edu).
This new tool allows instantaneous access to millions of print and e-books, articles from tens of thousands of ejournals, and Pitt's digital collections, including the Historic Pittsburgh Collection; the Archive of European Integration; and PhilSci, on which scholars in the philosophy of science can post their research for review by colleagues. PITTCat+ also provides access to the ejournals, CDs, DVDs and maps currently available on PITTCat Classic.
PITTCat+ also offers an enhanced approach to searching. When a user conducts a search, a visual "cloud" of words appears on the left side of the screen, displaying variant spellings of each search term, associated words, and the same word in other languages to ensure that a user doesn't miss relevant items. For example, using the search term "global warming" will cause such related words as "greenhouse," "ozone," and "climate" to appear. These are clickable and will provide the user with additional results. Images of book covers also appear, accompanied by book reviews and the table of contents, as well as a link to the full text.
PITTCat+ allows users to refine their search by author, topic, dates of publication, volumes on the shelf that are not checked out, or volumes available only online.
A user can save any search as an RSS feed and be notified when new material is added to the library that is relevant to that search. And a personal bookshelf called My Discoveries allows users to save, tag, rate, and create sharable lists of items.
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