Searching, Illinet, the WIU Online Catalog

What a library catalog does: A library catalog provides a means of identifying, locating and, in some cases, retrieving items with intellectual or artistic content: books, videos, cds, dvds, microfilm, microfiche, government documents, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other materials.

The Basics

Illinet is the name of our catalog--and it's also the name of 65 other catalogs at other Illinois universities. That's because in reality these separate catalogs are all one large catalog, containing tens of millions of records, which has been divided into discrete parts by institution. By default, when you click on the catalog link at Western, you are searching only WIU's part of the catalog. The same would be true at Illinois State, at Nothern Illinois University, at Eastern Illinois University and so on. However, it is possible, and easy, and sometimes convenient to search the entire catalog--if WIU does not have the item you want.

For the purposes of this course the words, "Illinet" and "library catalog" and "catalog" will refer to the same thing.

The Three Most Common Catalog Searches

The are various searches you can do in any library catalog, but the three most common ones are: Title, Author/Creator, and Subject.

The two search menus: Quick Search and Guided Search

Within Illinet, there are two menus by which one may search, the Quick Search--the default setting--and the Guided Search. 

About Records

When a person performs a search in Illinet, what is retrieved are records. Every item in the collection has a record associated with it. These records contain information (author, title, publisher, etc.) that allows a person to determine whether she has found the item she wants or not. The record notes where the item is located and what restrictions, if any, there are in obtaining the item. For example, some DVDs circulate. Others do not.  

About Fields

Records are composed of areas called "fields." Fields contain specific kinds of information. For instance, there is an "author" field which contains an author's last name, first name, and other identifying information (like a birth and/or death date). There is a title field that contains title information, a publisher field, a subject field, and so on. When someone searches for books by a particular author, she is actually searching the "author field" of over a million records. All the records whose "author field" information matches the search request are returned. This is what makes it possible to find every book by "Stephen King," by anyone whose first name is "Stephen," or whose last name is "King."

Most fields in a record are searchable. A few are not.

And now you know the basics. We will go over the above information in more detail below.

Catalog Design: 

Why do we have catalogs and why are they set up as they are? Catalogs exist because we need some way to retrieve specific items out of large collections. Suppose you had a million items of various kinds (WIU has slightly more than that), books, films, dvds, and so on.  How to order them? There is no natural, no inevitable way to do this. Conceivably you could catalog all items by color of their spines. You could catalog them in ascending order by the number of pages they contained. You could catalog them by size. You could catalog them by weight; by books that ended on an odd page number or those that ended on an even one. You could catalog them by those in which a black dog barks and those in which that does not happen. The point is you could, we could, catalog the items in any fashion we wanted. But if you want to catalog the items in your collection so that you can easily locate them, then your choices are narrowed.

Every item in a collection was created, whether by one person (most novels) or by hundreds (encyclopedias). It would be reasonable to be able to list items by author.  You could create a catalog wherein every information object was cataloged alphabetically by its author.  Imagine a list with thousands and thousands of  books, CDs, photographs, in alphabetical order. Consider how many tens of thousands of them would be created by various people with the last name Smith, and within the category “Smith,” how many created by different persons named, “Smith, Jim.” None of the items on this list would necessarily would have anything to do with the other than the fact that they were written by people sharing the same names, i.e. a book about the taxonomy of mollusks by Jim Smith of Bangor, Maine would be next to a country and western CD by, Jim Smith of Douglas, Arizona, followed by a comical novel set in the Presidency of Millard Fillmore by Jim Smith of New Harmony, Indiana.  If our catalog was alphabetical, then we would  have to shelve our items alphabetically, too, so that we could go from the catalog to the shelf to get our item. Consider what it would be like to wade through thousands of Jim Smiths to locate the book we wanted. We could probably make the process a little more efficient by alphabetizing by title within similar names, but the process of getting the book would still be a nightmare.

 Alternately, we could catalog the million items in our collection by number as they arrive at the library. We could assign each book a number and it would be a simple matter for people to track down the book by following the number. For example, we could assign  One Hundred Years of American Railroading the number 732,237 and shelve it accordingly. We could post a list saying that books 725,000 to 775,100 were located on the sixth floor. On the sixth floor we could put notices on each shelf telling what range of numbers was shelved there, e.g. 735,000 to 740,000. It would not take someone long to locate One Hundred Years of American Railroading. I say this because this is essentially what we do now. We provide a code that is keyed to the floors of the building and, then, to the shelves on the floor. If you know how to follow the code, you can pluck one book out of the million in a matter of minutes.

But let us return to the problem at hand, how to best catalog and arrange a million items? Listing the items in some numerical order seems to solve the identification issue. But let's consider it a moment. If you didn't know that One Hundred Years of American Railroading had the number 732,237 assigned to it, how would you locate it either in the catalog or on the shelf? Below is a schema showing the information we know coming in to the library--the book's title and author --and the information we don't know--it's shelf number--but which we need to get the book off the shelf so we can read it. hich of the five is the one we want. Many books share the same title so you'd run into a similar problem there.

It would make sense if we could locate the number using the information we do know, if the number were linked to the title or to the author or to both. This would entail the creation of two separate catalogs, one which contained all the titles in the collection and their associated shelf number and a similar one for all the authors. That simplifies things quite a bit, but we would still run into frequent problems. Imagine that John W. Starr had written 4 books. If we searched our catalog, we might come upon an entry like this John W. Starr: 345,657; 749,761; 888,346, 732,237. This tells us that John W. Starr wrote 5 books and we could find all five, but it does not tell us which one is the one we want, One Hundred Years of American Railroading. It would be more useful if the titles were linked to the authors and the authors to the titles and then both of these to the shelf number. That is to say, whenever you searched for an author, you would get a list of all titles associated  with that author and if you searched for titles, you would get a list of all authors associated with that title--and you would always get the shelf number no matter what you did. (See schema below).  This in fact what catalogs do. They link various kinds of descriptive information about an object to a code or protocol that allows a person to locate and retrieve that object be it a book, a DVD, a map. The more linked descriptive information you have about an object, the easier it is to locate.

In fact catalogs contain a good deal of linked descriptive information about the objects in them. Likewise, if you know an object's creator or author you can find all the objects (by title) associated with that author, also the various dates on which the objects were published, who published them. An object's record  ties or links all this information together. Technically, record is a collection of descriptive data about an item. More simply you might think of a record as the home of all the descriptive information about an object.  When you are searching the catalog, you are really searching for the right record--because it is the record that will lead you to the object you want be it a book, a musical score, a government document, a DVD.

More About Records

Let's imagine you ran a title search for Center Ring: The People of the Circus by Robert Taylor. Lewis. The catalog gives you the book's record, which appears below. Every item in the catalog has a record.  All the information on a record is linked by  the simple virtue of being part of the same record, somewhat as roommates are linked by living in the same house or students who belong to the same class.

Essentially an object's record contains facts that provide information needed to identify that object (in this case a book) and distinguish it from other objects in the collection and physically locate it. The top part of the record (which has boldface type) supplies the information (author, title, subject, etc.) needed to determine whether this object is the one you want. This is where the information you search by is largely located. The lower part of the record (which uses italics) furnishes the information (which library is it in, what is the call number, is it available) needed to physically locate the object.

  Below is a schema for the information contained in the record above.

You might be wondering why the arrows point to something called an "information object" rather than to, say, a box with the title of book inside of it. I structured it this way to point out that the same information contained in the book could also be contained in a DVD, in microfilm, an MP3 file, a manuscript, and so on. We may want the information in a preferred "container" or format, e.g. a book over an MP3 file--and, if so, we will look for the information in a book, but it is the information we are looking for. That is what we primarily want. That is what the catalog is essentially set up to do: locate information and tell you how to retrieve it. It so happens that most of the information in a library catalog is in print format, but more and more it exists also in electronic format as a digital file or only as a digital file. In coming years it is likely that most of the information in the catalog will be in digital format--but that time is still a ways off.

About Call Numbers

Imagine you run the title search below for One Hundred Years of American Railroading. Which you can do by clicking here.

You are taken to this record.

 This book is assigned a call number, TF23 .S8.  A call number is an element of a location code. As a code, it has a message we can understand if we if we know how to decipher it.  This code is representative of a family of codes called shelf classification codes--because these codes determine where items get shelved. Libraries use a number of such codes, but in the United States three codes predominate--and all three are used by WIU Libraries: Dewey Decimal System (used in the WIU Curriculum Library, in high school libraries, and in most public libraries), the Library of Congress Classification Code (used in the main collection and in all the branch libraries except the Curriculum Library) and the Superintendent of Documents classification code, which is used for government documents.

The Dewey Decimal system is a purely numeric system. Library of Congress and Superintendent of Document are mixed alphabetical and numeric codes. One Hundred Years of American Railroading is shelved in WIU's main collection in the Malpass Library and, therefore, will be shelved according to the Library of Congress Classification system (LC for short). If One Hundred Years of American Railroading were in Curriculum Library, it would be shelved according to the Dewey Decimal System. Why shelve the books using different codes? The Curriculum Library is designed to be a teaching tool for elementary and secondary education students. Nearly all elementary and secondary schools use the Dewey Decimal system--therefore, the Curriculum Library does.

More About the Library of Congress (LC) Classification System

LC divides all knowledge into 21 categories, as, for example, Social Science, Geography, Agriculture, Literature, etc. It didn't have to be 21 categories, it could have been 10 (as in Dewey) or 43 or 223. But a little over 100 years ago designers of the LC system decided that all knowledge could be put under 21 headings. So that is what we are stuck with.

In LC each category is assigned a letter of the alphabet. An outline of these categories is available by clicking here. One of these 21 divisions is Technology. Technology is assigned the letter "T." This means the call number of all items cataloged under Technology start will start with a "T." As railroading is a form of technology (specifically transportation technology), books about railroading have call numbers that begin with a "T."  This explains the T in One Hundred Years of American Railroading's call number, TF23.  S8.

All the categories in LC break down into more refined subclasses. These subclasses are also alphabetic. See below. One Hundred Years of American Railroading is classed in TF. So now you can account for the F in TF23. S8

The subclasses are themselves broken down, this time numerically. See below. Numbers coming low in the classification (like the "23" in TF23) typically deal with less specialized works, often historical overviews, as, for instance, One Hundred Years of American Railroading. 

Subclass TF

TF1-1620 Railroad engineering and operation
TF200-320 Railway construction
TF340-499 Railway equipment and supplies
TF501-668 Railway operation and management
TF670-851 Local and light railways
TF840-851 Elevated railways and subways
TF855-1127 Electric railways
TF1300-1620 High speed ground transportation

Below is an image of the guide to cataloging books in the range TF1 to TF127. You will see that TF 21 to 127 is reserved for books about railroading in particular countries. One Hundred Years of American Railroading is about railroading in a particular country, ours. So, this is the appropriate range. Note that the guide asks the cataloger to refer to Table 1 to see what number goes with which country. If you will scroll down, you can see table 1.

Below is an image of Table 1. Note that 23 is for General Works about American railroading. One Hundred Years of American Railroading is a general work (a work that is broad in its approach) to railroading. So it gets the 23. Now, you know why One Hundred Years of American Railroading gets the call number TF23

Within sub-sub classes, like TF23, the items are usually arranged alphabetically by the first letter of the author's last name. See example below.

The last name of the man who wrote One Hundred Years of American Railroading is Starr. Hence, TF23 S. The remaining letters of the last name (in this case "tarr") are resolved into a number by means of algorithm. In this case, "tarr" resolves into "8." Thus, we get TF23 S8. If an author writes more than one book that falls into the same sub-sub class--as happens frequently in the literature category--then the books are further arranged in chronological order and a date is added to the call number. For example, French Home Cooking by Claire dePratz has a call number of TX (cookery) 719 (French Cooking General Works)  P 75 ("ratz) with the date, 1956. If there is more than one copy of the same item, then a copy number is added to the call number.  Likewise, if a work is contained in more than one volume, a volume number is added (v.1, for instance--see  TF 23 .L4 v.1 above).

Let's look at a record for another book. The top part of the record, as we noted above, contains the information needed to identify the book, to answer the question, "Is this the book I want?"  Note that each descriptive area is prefaced by a boldfaced identifier, e.g. Author, Title, Published, and so on. When dealing with catalog records, librarians call these identifiers, "fields." We can speak of the "author field," the "title field," the "publisher field," the "location field." People speak of themselves as searching within certain fields, "I searched the author field for Grissel and came up with Insects and Orders." That translates as, "I looked for an author named Koussevitzky and didn't find anything."

You will also notice among the identifying information at the top of the record three numbers, ISBN; LC Card Number, and Other Identifying Number. The most important of these numbers for our purposes is the ISBN, the International Standard Book Number. Since the early 1960s, each book sold in the United States, and most sold (legally) in the world has had its own ISBN. Publishers and booksellers use this unique identifier  to track inventory and sales. It matters to us because if you wanted to purchase this book, providing the bookseller with an ISBN is the easiest way to do that. We will talk more about ISBNs later when we discuss locating books not in our collection.

Using Subject Headings to Search the Catalog.

As we noted earlier, one of the key aims of any library catalog is to help users find related information, i.e. not only find one book but other related materials, whether by the same author or on a similar topic. You will note that that several of the record's fields are hyper-linked. Clicking on any of these fields will initiate a search in the catalog. Clicking on Grissell, Eric, will launch a search for books by Eric Grissell. Clicking on Beneficial Insects will start a search for any books with the subject, "Beneficial Insects."  Clicking on the call number will show you all the books on the same shelf as the book in question.  Later, we will look at this feature in depth.