October 31, 2008

Helping a patron find books in Russian

A question came up recently on the NHAIS-ILL listserv about finding books written in Russian. This is not a question that comes up a lot for most libraries, but it is something that is easy to do in NHU-PAC.


To find BOOKS in RUSSIAN, here is what you do:

1- Go to the NHU-PAC web site.

2- Go to the Advanced Searching tab, then click on the Monographs subtab.

3-Type an asterisk (*) into the box next to "Title includes" to get ANY book.

4- From the dropdown list below where it says "Limits" select Russian.

5 - Click on the red arrow, or press the Enter key, to execute your search.


If you wanted your results to appear in a particular order, sorted by publication date for example, you could choose that option from the "Sorting" drop-down menu at the bottom of the search screen, or apply the sorting criteria to your result set using the boxes at the top right corner of the results window.


This same process will work for any of the 27 languages that appears in the limit list. The list was created based on which languages were actually represented in the NHU-PAC when we set up the system.

If you are looking for materials in a language that is not in the list you can do that too, it just takes different steps:


1- Use the OCLC MARC Code List for Languages to identify the MARC Code for the language you are interested in. Let's say we want to know if anyone has materials in Abenaki. The code for that is the collective code for Algonquian languages (Other) which is alg.

2- Go to the NHU-PAC web site.

3- Go to the Advanced Searching tab, you will be on the Boolean subtab which is what you want.

4- Below the words "Search by:" there are a series of dropdown boxes. From the first one of these boxes select MARC Language Code then type your code (alg in my example) into the search box to the right of the dropdown.

5 - Click on the red arrow, or press the Enter key, to execute your search.

So are there any items in Abenaki? Try the search and find out!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments on this blog are welcome, but they are moderated. Signed comments that we feel make a positive contribution to the discussion will be posted.