LocatorPlus® Changes in 2006

during 2006, NLM® made many changes to LocatorPlus®, the Library's Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). LocatorPlus is the OPAC component of the Endeavor Voyager® software, the Library's Integrated Library System. NLM upgraded LocatorPlus by adding Voyager with Unicode in January and Voyager versions 5.0 and 6.1 in a second upgrade in early July.

In addition, a project team reviewed LocatorPlus configurations and layout design. Many LocatorPlus screens were customized and modifications were made to make searching more user friendly. These modifications were the first major changes to the overall look of LocatorPlus since its introduction in 1998. The information below outlines these version and design changes.

Display and Searching of Non-Roman Characters

This year the NLM made Endeavor's Voyager with Unicode¹ release available on LocatorPlus. The Voyager with Unicode release allows users to view and search the non-Roman characters present in over 4,000 LocatorPlus records (see Figure 1). Prior to this change, catalog records contained only transliterated title, author, publisher and other information. Now information is available for searching and display in the original language. Vernacular data are supplied for access points such as author, title, edition and imprint. Character sets currently represented in LocatorPlus include Arabic (see Figures 3 and 4), Chinese (simplified and traditional), Cyrillic, Hebrew, Japanese (Figures 1 and 2), and Korean. As new titles in these languages are added to the collection, vernacular data will be included in the LocatorPlus record.

As shown in Figures 2 and 4, Voyager with Unicode employs the MARC 21 880 fields to link Romanized versions of title, and name fields to the non-Roman counterparts.

Note: Users must install their operating system's font support for proper display as well as the appropriate keyboard layout.

More information about Unicode is available in the LocatorPlus FAQ.

New LocatorPlus Features

Changes to LocatorPlus continued with the combined update in July to Voyager versions 5.0 and 6.1. Features that are now available with these versions include:

• Additional keyword searching options in Simple Search:

  Keyword (automatic AND)

  Keyword (automatic OR)

  Keyword Relevance (automatic AND)

  Name Keyword (automatic AND)

  Name Keyword (automatic OR)

  Subject Keyword (automatic AND)

  Subject Keyword (automatic OR)

  Title Keyword (automatic AND)

  Title Keyword (automatic OR)

  
  Results of Keyword searches are sorted and displayed by title, with a secondary sort by date.
  
  
• Availability of Headings Keyword searches in Simple Search:

  Name Heading Keyword

  Name/Title Heading Keyword

  Series Heading Keyword

  Subject Heading Keyword

  
  Heading Keyword searches result in an alphabetic listing of all the headings that contain the keyword(s) entered. Limits may not be used in Heading Keyword searches.
  
  
• Availability of Holdings Keyword searches in Advanced Menu Search.
  This allows the searcher to specify a word or phrase from the Holdings statement as a search term. Figure 5 shows one of the ways to identify free electronic resources on a subject. Figure 6 shows a sample record retrieved.
  
  
  
  Figure 5: Holdings Keyword search on the MeSH term Drug Therapy for resources that are free on the Web.
  
  
  
  
  Figure 6: Holdings display of a record retrieved from the search in Figure 5 showing the occurrence of the Holdings Keyword "free" in the Call Number field.
  
  
  The screen in Figure 7 shows how to identify records that include "finding aids," electronic resources used to locate specific items in an archival collection while Figure 8 shows a sample record retrieved.
  
  
  
  Figure 7: A Holdings Keyword search for archival materials by or about the Public Health Service that have finding aids. The MARC 21 holdings keyword field contains information on the electronic location and access to resources related to the described material, such as the finding aids produced by the NLM History of Medicine staff.
  
  
  
  
  Figure 8: Holdings display of a record retrieved from the search in Figure 7 showing the keyword phrase "Finding aid" in the Electronic Links information.
  
  
  
• Improved functioning of the question mark (?) as a wildcard.
  The question mark can now substitute for zero, one, or more characters at the beginning, or the middle of a search term, as well as at the end of the term.
  
  

  Example:	Retrieves:
  neuro?pharmacology	neuropharmacology, neuropsychopharmacology
  h?ematology	hematology or haematology
  ?clinic	clinic, polyclinic, multiclinic, teleclinic, etc.
  clinic?	clinic, clinics, clinical, clinician, clinicians, etc.

  
  Note: the asterisk is not available as a wildcard in LocatorPlus because it is used in Voyager to increase the relevance of a term. The question mark wildcard does not work in Z39.50 searches of LocatorPlus.
  
  
• The introduction of the percent sign (%) as a single-character wildcard.
  The percent sign can be used at the beginning, middle, or end of a search term and can be used in multiples to represent a specific number of characters:
  
  

  Example	Retrieves
  wom%n	woman or women
  clinic%	clinics, clinica, clinico, etc.
  clinic%%%	clinician, clinicals, etc.

  
  Note: the percent sign wildcard does not work in Z39.50 searches of LocatorPlus.
  
  
• Heading subdivision separators.
  MeSH headings are separated from subheadings by two dashes, providing a clearer display:

  299		Lung Neoplasms
  5		Lung Neoplasms--blood
  27		Lung Neoplasms--chemically induced
  2		Lung Neoplasms--chemistry
  11		Lung Neoplasms--classification
  8		Lung Neoplasms--complications

  
  The heading subdivision separators display in both the Subject search results, as shown above, and in the Details display of an individual record.
  
  
• Support of 13-digit ISBN.
  Effective January 1, 2007, the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) will increase in length from 10 digits to 13 digits. Voyager Version 6.1 supports this change, approved by the International Standards Organization in ISO 2108 (May 2005). The 13-digit ISBN increases the number of ISBNs available, enabling the publishing industry to accommodate new publishing formats and new publishers. It is possible to search LocatorPlus using either the 10-digit ISBN or the 13-digit number. See the article Cataloging News 2007. NLM Tech Bull. 2006 Nov-Dec; (353):e4. for more information on use of ISBN-13 in LocatorPlus records.
  
  In LocatorPlus, search the ISBN by selecting ISBN as the type of search from the Advanced Menu choices. Enter the ISBN without using hyphens or spaces (see Figure 9):
  
  
  
  Figure 9: An Advanced Menu Search example for an ISBN with 13 digits.
  
  
  

Design Changes to LocatorPlus

Also in 2006, the Library introduced display modifications to some search screens, added new search types, and added two new display tabs. Some changes were subtle such as font styles, search screen labels, search button labels, button shapes, colors of some screens, and increasing search relevance by reweighting MARC fields included in several search types. Other enhancements that may be more obvious to LocatorPlus searchers include:

• New choices for the number of records displayed on the Results page.
  Searchers can display 10, 25, 50, or 100 records per page.
  
  
• The default display of authority record searches is now MARC View.
  
  
• Two new display tabs on the search results screen see Figure 10:
  
  
  1. Table of Contents
     Click this tab to display the table of contents of a work. If no contents are available in a record, this message will show:
     
     There is no Table of Contents in this record.
     
     
  2. More Like This
     Click this tab to find more records similar to the one retrieved. Depending on the record, a user can click on such elements as author, series, or subject heading to retrieve additional records that may be of interest.
     
     Figure 10: New line-up of display choices at the top of the LocatorPlus record display page. The new tabs can also be seen in Figures 1, 3, and 6.
     
     
     
• Name as Subject.
  Added as a search option in both Simple Search and Advanced Menu Search. Use this option to search for materials about a person or organization.
  
  
• Labeled fields in the Holdings and Details displays were reordered.
  For instance Author(s) /Name(s): now appears after Title:
  
  
• New field labels enhance the Details display, especially of rare books.
  New labels for information formerly contained in Notes, with MARC fields and description, include:
  
  

  Summary:	520 XX ab	Summary abstract, annotation, review, etc.
  Terms of Use:	506 XX a	Restriction on Access Note
  	540 XX a	Terms Governing Use and Reproduction Note
  Cite As:	524 XX a	Preferred Citation of Described Materials
  Acquisition Source:	541 XX acde35	Immediate Source of Acquisition
  Provenance:	561 XX a35	Ownership and Custodial History

  
  
  
• Journal Title searches display the full journal title.
  Full Title in the results list may help users in identifying the specific journal record wanted (see Figure 11).
  
  Figure 11: Results screen for Journal Title search of Journal of Gerontology displays Journal Title/Title Abbreviation and Full Title.
  
  
  

For more information about these changes, see the LocatorPlus FAQs or the LocatorPlus Help. Questions about LocatorPlus may be sent to NLM Customer Service.

¹ Unicode is the universal character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium. By using more than one byte to represent each character, Unicode can represent almost all characters for most of the world's written languages.

By Mary Conway
Reference and Web Services Section

Conway M. LocatorPlus Changes in 2006. NLM Tech Bull. 2007 Jan-Feb;(354):e3.