HKUL is about to launch its new online library catalogue. The new catalogue offers a whole host of discovery tools, from faceted search results, refine tools (by format, tags, subject, location, language, etc), Recently Added, and Did you mean? or automatic spellcheck of your search query. A quick test using one of my usual queries yielded a few new discoveries right away.
Part of this new platform is social stuff like being able to add tags. I don’t see a whole lot more right now but I’ll explore more and report back later.
One awkward thing is that when you click on Find Out More for a given item, a new window opens and takes you back to the staple Dragon record for that item. Seems a bit clumsy but maybe a small price to pay for a vastly improved search interface.
One of the things I particularly like about this interface is that it leaves a crumb trail of your search. (If that doesn’t make sense it’s because I’m really, really tired and delirious right now.) There’s a Back to Results link that takes you back to the previous page you were looking at. Surprising how many OPACs around don’t have this and you end up hitting the back button on your browser to retrace your steps.
