NCSU Libraries - NCSU Libraries Unveils Revolutionary, Endeca-Powered Online Catalog News

NCSU Libraries - NCSU Libraries Unveils Revolutionary, Endeca-Powered Online Catalog News.

Posted @ 09:10:21 am | Section: Latest News, News Releases |  Permalink

NCSU Libraries Unveils Revolutionary, Endeca-Powered Online Catalog

Media contact: Anna Dahlstein, (919) 513-0379

The NCSU Libraries announced today the first library deployment of a revolutionary new online catalog. Leveraging the advanced search and Guided Navigation? capabilities of the Endeca ProFind™ platform, the NCSU Libraries' new catalog provides the speed and flexibility of popular online search engines while capitalizing on existing catalog records. As a result, students, faculty, and researchers can now search and browse the NCSU Libraries' collection as quickly and easily as searching and browsing the Web, while taking advantage of rich content and cutting-edge capabilities that no Web search engine can match.

After submitting a search, users are presented with a list of matching results ranked by relevance and are offered several navigation refinement options based on characteristics of the materials in the results set. Navigation options include topic, author, genre, language, material type, format, and availability. Sorting options include publication date, title, author, call number, and popularity. To help users understand the navigation choices they have made, the application displays a "breadcrumb" of the refinements selected that allows backtracking and broadening of search results. Catalog users can also browse the entire collection by subject, without issuing a search at all, which is a feature that no other library catalog supports.

NC State Vice Provost and Director of Libraries Susan K. Nutter says, "With this groundbreaking approach, the NCSU Libraries is responding to Web searchers who expect to retrieve results in order of relevance. The new system - the first of its kind in a library - empowers users to quickly locate the items they're looking for or to explore the multifaceted research collection in depth, exploiting both the software's cutting-edge capabilities and the library's many decades of investment in detailed cataloging and classification."

Revolutionary, groundbreaking, and exciting.. congratulations to Andrew Pace [Head, Systems @ NCSU Libraries] and his team.. as he wrote on WEB4LIB, "Hat's off to the lead developer, a brand new librarian, Emily Lynema. She and the nimble product implementation team put this new catalog together in less than 6 months!" .. be sure and try the "browse" feature, it's awesome.. OPACs and Library Catalogs don't need to be ugly pigs anymore; we can put "lipstick" on them now...