Encore Brings You More
CONTRIBUTED BY JOAN M. BARNES, UNL LIBRARIES
The UNL Libraries website (iris.unl.edu) offers students, faculty and staff access to numerous electronic resources including databases, digital images, book collections , digital resources (e.g. Willa Cather Archives), and UNL dissertations and faculty research. Previously, researchers had to search each resource separately. Now the Libraries catalog vendor, Innovative Interfaces, has developed the next generation of search engines, Encore, which can search a library catalog and other electronic resources simultaneously.
UNL Libraries is using Encore as a new search option. Besides finding and pulling results from many different resources, Encore lists the integrated results by relevance. Also users can limit a search by "facets" (year, format, collection, library, etc.) from the navigation bar on the left or pick from a grouping of words related to the search terms (known as the tag cloud). To illustrate, a search on "Weldon Kees" retrieves 29 print titles, three musical compositions from the Digital Commons, 7 images from CONTENTdm, and two University Archives Finding Aids, as well as Yahoo images.
Users can also add their own tags to the records for easier searching. The UNL Kutak Center for Teaching and Study of Applied Ethics is using the tag feature to create its own unique list of ethics materials held by the Libraries and connecting those lists to the Center's own web site.
Encore is the new Web 2.0 search engine for finding scholarly materials. Enjoy your searching with the new UNL Libraries search box.
Connectivity is a publication of UNL Information Services
