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Good Morning, today we're going to briefly talk about a couple of tips for when you're
searching for items in MNCAT Discovery.
The first thing we'll cover is a search for a book that we are pretty sure is in the collection,
called "Capitalism Takes Command." In this case, if we type the title into the search
bar, we get over 17,000 results.
If we take a look at these, we might notice that a lot of these results are actually reviews
of the book we're looking for, in addition to any number of books & articles that might
contain the words "capitalism" or "command."
One of the ways to quickly cut down this result set when we know we're looking for something
in the catalog is to click "Libraries Catalog:"
When we do this, we're down to 2 results, and the item we're looking for is the first
result. This brings up a good strategy when dealing
with MNCAT Discovery: because the collection is so large, one of the best ways to handle
the results is to reduce the scope of what you're searching as quickly as possible.
Similarly, here's a topic search for video games and obesity, which gives us about 7500
results. This is a common issue in MNCAT DIscovery, which is that because the index is so large,
you might get too too many results.
One of the best ways to get the most relevant results is to use the facets that are generated
on the left side of the screen. These can help you limit your results to only the kinds
of materials you're interested in. For example, let's say that in my "video games and obesity"
search, what I really want is peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last few
years. By clicking the facets on the left, I can tell MNCAT DIscovery to show me only
those items.
Now, we've cut down the number of results a little, and more importantly we're seeing
more relevant results on the first few pages.
Thanks for watching. If you encounter any problems or issues with MNCAT Discovery, please
report them on the form at http://z.umn.edu/primoscenario