Thanks to the generosity of the people of San Francisco, our collections continue to grow—at last count we had around 2.5 million items. In fact, each month we add around 18,000 books, 2,000 DVDs, 900 Music CDs, and 540 audio books/ language learning CDs.
That’s a whole lot of material to keep track of, but thanks to our online public access catalog (OPAC), and our trained professional librarians we can find our materials. While library catalogs have improved over the years, trained professionals are still needed
in many cases to locate the hard stuff, especially if a user is looking for a topic rather than a specific author or title.
Fortunately, our library catalog is about to get even better — in August we will have Encore!
Encore is a new addition to our catalog that displays new enhanced results to help you find the information you need. Encore elegantly presents Web 2.0 tools, such as faceted search results, a Tag Cloud, a Did You Mean...? suggestion ( if you misspelled a word),
or a listing of Popular Choices/suggestions, and relevance ranking. Encore creates an entirely new user experience offering the searcher dozens of common language keyword tags and related subjects, as well as the capability to easily limit the results by date,
material type, or library location. It makes finding as easy as searching, leverages Web 2.0 technologies and practices and is just plain fun!
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