FAQ

General

1. Are the library opening times displayed general or for the current week?
2. How do I increase/decrease the size of the text on the screen?

My Account

1. How do I change my PIN?
2. Are logins / PINs case-sensitive?
3. How many tries do I get when logging in?
4. How can I see how many items I have on loan?

Searching

1. What are the differences between the different search options?
2. How do I search for an item if I only know the author's name or words from the title?
3. How do I restrict my search to CDs or DVDs?
4. How do I search for items published within a specific date range?
5. How do I restrict my search to specific fields such as author, title or classmark?
6. How do I save searches to run later?
7. My search didn't return the results expected. Where can I find help?

Search results

1. How do I change the details displayed?
2. How do I find out where items are held? (results page locations)
3. How do I view the item using Google Preview?
4. How do I save records of interest?

Answers

General

1. The library opening times shown are for today and the next seven days.
2. To increase or decrease the text size, click the AA± icon at the top right of the screen to display the magnification selector. Each click of the + icon will increase the text size by 10%; each click of the - icon will decrease the text size by 10%. Magnifications between 80% and 150% can be selected. To change your default magnification (i.e. the initial magnification set when you log in), log in then select Preferences, change the Text size(%) to the magnification required - any value can be entered, but the text size will only increase to a maximum of 130% and decrease to a minimum of 80% - then click Save.

My Account

1. To change your PIN, select Preferences from the top menu, then click Change PIN. Enter your current PIN and new PIN in the boxes provided then click OK.
2. PINs are not case sensitive.
3. There is no limit to the number of time you can attemp to enter your PIN.
4. To see how many items you have on loan, log in, and the number will be displayed in the Account details panel to the right of the screen. To see details of the items on loan, select My Account: the items will be listed in the Loans table.

Searching

1. What are the differences between the different search options?
2. Select the Guided Search option the enter the title and/or author details in the relevant boxes.
3. Both the Guided Search and Advanced Search options can be used to restrict searches to specific media types.
4. Using the Guided Search, enter the first and last date of the range to search in the Publication Date boxes. The Year field may also be available for number range searching in the Advanced Search.
5. Use the Advanced Search option to compose detailed searches on specific fields, or, alternatively, if you just want to find a specific item using a word from the title, author, subject or keyword fields, you can use the Guided Search.
6. Recent searches are saved in the Search History. If you are not logged in, this will contain searches from the current session only. If you are logged in, it will also contain searches from previous sessions where you have been logged in. Select Search history from the top menu, locate the search you wish to repeat in the searches list, then click the hyperlink to re-run the search. There is a limit to how many searches are saved to the search history, however. This limit is displayed on the Preferences screen. Once the limit is reached, older searches will be deleted from the list for each new search that is added. To ensure a search is saved until you wish to delete it, save it as a Favourite.
7. If the search returned too few items, you can see how many results would be returned by searching for each individual search phrase, or using the next loosest precision setting on the See Also page. If your search returns too many results, you could try increasing the search precision. The Search Tips help page contains information on how to construct searches.

Search results

1. There are two results screens for viewing the results: Summary and Detailed. The summary results screen contains multiple records per screen and displays brief details of each. In both Summary and Detailed display, you can select different display formats to display different fields, using different layouts. From any results screen, click the Change display button to open a box in which you can select the display format to use.
2. Information about the copies for an item are displayed in some summary display formats. Some summary display formats include the location: to see this, click Change display from the results page and select a Summary display format containing 'Accession location' in the description. Some summary display formats show the number of items and their current status (on loan, available, etc.). Look for Summary display formats containing 'status' in the description.
3. To view the item via Google Preview, display the item using the Detailed display format 'Cover image with dynamically generated information'. If Google Preview is available for the item, you will see a Google Preview button beneath the cover image. Click it to open a popup containing the preview.
4. Records from search results can be saved in Favourite lists.