Recently, I have attended some cataloguing training using Symphony by SirsiDynix. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it! The State Library of Tasmania (LINC Tasmania) and most state government school libraries use the system. I think it’s superior to some of the library management system I have come across with. For those who don’t know what cataloguing is, it’s simply assigning descriptions to library items so that people could find them easily. So for example, for the book: Green Eggs and ham by Dr Seuss the cataloguer would have added tags (such as title, subjects, author, format and so on) to that item so it would be easier for you to search under those tags using keyword search.

I don’t want to bore you with the cataloguing process but what I found intriguing was the use of BOOLEAN operators (words such as AND, NOT, OR and other symbols * $ &) to limit your search so you won’t get a whole lot of unwanted rubbish. You could try these on most library OPACs but since we do a lot of our searches online, here’s Google’s version of search operators which might come in very handy. I particularly like Google’s automatic spell-checker, so if you mispelt a word it will default to the most common spelling of that given word. Awesome! Here are some more search tips to help you along.

Now…I wonder if Google is looking for another indexer. Hmm.