Under the Cupola

Get ebooks for your Kindle at the library

Amazon Kindle® compatibility with the Camas library's eBook collection is here.   With this update most existing OverDrive eBooks available at the Washington Anytime Library can be read on all Kindle devices or by using free Kindle apps on iPhone®, iPad®, Android™, and other mobile devices.  Go to the Washington Anytime Libraryand use your Camas Library card for access.

Doing Power Searches in the Catalog

    Have you ever entered a search term which returned way too many pages of results? Have you ever wanted to see a list of our DVD's? A list of our books on CD? Find books just from this library that are just for kids? You can achieve such results by using some of the specialized searches available in the catalog.

     When you get into the catalog, directly beneath the login area, there is a menu bar. Click on "searching." You will find there an array of different search icons. Click on "Power Search."

   You will see that there are fields for searching Title, Author, Subject, Series, Periodical Title, ISBN, and Search Everything.

If you click on the arrows immediately to the right of them, you will get a drop-down menu which contains this complete list of fields. This will allow you to change the names of the fields. You change all the fields to subject if you wanted.

        Next, at the far right of each field, are the Boolean operators. These allow you to combine searching in multiple fields in different ways:

• AND - Your search results must include both terms. A search for "cats AND dogs" will return items which include cats and dogs.
• OR - A search for "cats OR dogs" will return everything about cats and also everything about dogs.
• NOT - Your search for "cats NOT dogs" will return things that are about cats but say nothing about dogs.

     You can also limit your searches in several ways:

• Library:  You can limit your search to the holdings of any particular library in the system.
• Language: You can also limit your search to the language of the materials. There are 30 to choose from.
  
• Genre:  Here you'll find ways to limit to things like mystery, sci-fi, audiobook, horror, western, biography or any of the 25 choices.
• Audience: Here you can limit your search to materials for adults, adult literacy, large print, juvenile, or young adult.
• Match on:  You can have you search match on keyword, the exact term you used, or browse.
• Publication Year:  You can further narrow it to items published in a particular year.
• Sort by:  Lastly, you can have you search sort by the newest item, the oldest, author, subject, or title.

     OK, kids, are you ready? Let's do some power searching!

     Say you know that there's a Jack Kerouac novel you want, you can't remember the whole title, but you're pretty sure it has "bums" in it. Plug "Kerouac" into the author field and "bums" into the title field and see what you get.

     To find a list of our movies on DVD, change the library to Camas, change the genre to "Films on DVD", and click on search. You could do the same thing for our movies on VHS. Just choose "Films on VHS"  instead.

     If you want to find materials about dogs which are just for kids, plug "dogs" into the subject field and change the audience to "juvenile."

     Say you want to read Sun Tzu's "Art of War", but you just want the one where James Clavell wrote the introduction. You could search combining the title & James Clavell, or you could search just including the two authors.

       So there you have it. All the advanced searching you can carry. Play around  with these searches and see how specific of an item you can  find. If you need any help, the reference staff will be glad to help. Happy hunting!

Rebel

Suspending your holds

    Within your library account you have the option of modifying your holds. Now that it's summer vacation time, now's the best time to try out one of the cooler features available to you - you can suspend your holds. You might want to do this if you're going on vacation; that way your holds haven't come and gone back to their former predicaments before you get back into town. You might also want to do this to ensure you've read one book before another. A big advantage to this is that you don't lose your place in line.

    To suspend your holds, log into your account from the catalog and then click on the  "Review My Account" button. To the right of each individual hold is an "Edit Hold" button. Click on the button. You will get a list of options. You can either enter the date you want to start the suspension or click the calendar icon at the right to select a date. Then do the same for the ending date, or the date you want the hold to be reactivated.

    ***SUPER-CRITICAL IMPORTANT TIP!!!*** If you are altering any of these dates, YOU MUST RE-SELECT THE PICKUP LOCATION. Otherwise, the computer will assume you want to pick it up at Fort Vancouver's main branch and that's where they'll go. Click on the "Accept Changes" button and you're done. Don't forget to log out! So, if you're getting ready to head out on vacation, or if you're just sick of reading for a while, give this a try.

Rebel

Using the "Printable View"

     A common internet problem we encounter, virtually on a daily basis, is a patron being unable to print out something from their email account. Usually this is because of the phenomenon of "frames" in web page design. Lots of web pages are divided into physical segments which contain different things like the name of the site, menu options, links, categories, etc. When you attempt to print, you'll typically only get the contents of whichever frame was active when the page loaded (usually just the banner on top of the page, which is often just an advertisement).
    With this in mind, email programs offer a link to a "Printable View" of the email. Clicking on this link will put your email into a document-like format for the purposes of easy printing. Look also for similar names such as "Printer View" or "Printer-Friendly View" or the like.
     And that's not all - you'll find that lots of sites which offer printable downloads of things also use this feature. Common examples of this are sites which sell tickets, sites offering coupons, recipe cards, and so on.

- Rebel

The World of Audio (part 1)

The world of audiobooks—recorded books, books on tape, whatever you’d like to call them—is quickly evolving.

For example, the Camas Public Library is now offering Playaway books for circulation. These are self-playing full-length books on flash memory units smaller than a deck of cards. Just plug in your headphones and press play. No swapping disks or tapes and you can stop them and restart right where you left off. You can even control the voice speed.

For years, Project Gutenberg has been converting books not covered by copyright into text files available online. (There are currently over 19,000 titles, in many different languages.)

Now, LibriVox is taking these public domain titles and recording them. At this time you can download over 100 titles—absolutely free—to your computer and burn a CD to play in your car or load the book onto your iPod.

Each title on their website comes with a brief intro and links to the written text, and links to Wikipedia articles on the author and criticism of the book (long live open source). Some of the titles are for kids (Wind in the Willows, for example). The readers are amateurs, so the quality can vary. If you want to break into the narration gig, they’re also looking for readers.

If you’re hungry for yet more, several other sites (spokenalex.org, literalsystems.org) have fewer but different titles. AudioVox has a list of “audiolit” projects on its site. Some of these are podcasts of books a chapter at a time.

If like audiobooks or the classics, give these a try. It’s the wave of the future.  Let us know your experiences with these downloads.

--David

News about your holds

There’s good news for library users about holds that came with our recent upgrade.

You can now suspend your holds for a period of time.  The new upgrade allows users to set a date for holds to go to a suspended status and at the same time set the date for them to reactivate, if you wish.   

This works great when you go on vacation.  Your holds won't show up until after you return.

Relax as far as new procedures to learn for the upgrade.  The rest of the changes will be behind the scenes and are designed to make staff operations more effective.