Ex Libris MELvyl Tells (EL Mel Tells)!
Volume 3, Number 1, February 2004
In this issue:
Long records in Melvyl - Printing ProblemsWhen records in the Melvyl Catalog that include very long lines of text are printed from the Print Preview screen, the text will not wrap; consequently, some data may be lost from the printed page. See, for example, the title, Making of America's Homeless.
If you encounter these types of records, a couple of solutions are to …
- Save the file before printing it. When you save the file, be sure to change the extension (.sav is the default extension) to a text format (like .txt or .rtf) which will open a text editor, like Notepad or Microsoft Word, that will wrap the long lines and print these correctly.
- Email the file to yourself. Most email programs will wrap long lines of text automatically. When the email arrives, you can then print the file and no text will have been lost.
Melvyl Search Oddity: And, Or, Not
The words and, or, or not are used in Melvyl as Boolean operators. When they appear as part of a title, for example, "Not for ourselves alone" or "The red and the black"
- Use Browse to search for the title by clicking the Browse link in the yellow menu bar, then selecting Title begins with from the dropdown menu and enter your title in the input box.
- Search the title by placing double quotes (" ") around the entire title AND clicking the "No" for Words as Phrase radio button and enter your title in the input box.
This information is available in Melvyl Help under Limiting, Expanding and Connecting Search Terms: Phrases and Proximity.
We get letters…The Melvyl feedback feature yields some interesting information, one bit being—we are not alone in the universe! Recent feedback messages come not only from all over the United States but also from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, and Thailand. People are looking for information from the University of California libraries that they haven’t been able to find in other places…dissertations, sound recordings, and rare and difficult to locate works.
There are several broad categories the feedback messages fall into:
People wanting library access to UC collections, such as alums
Problems accessing Melvyl with old versions of Web browsers—some verrry old versions!
Help with searching the catalog, creating Profiles, accessing online journals
People puzzled with the merging of records (this is an area for which we are awaiting a "fix" from Ex Libris)
Acquisitions questions—why doesn’t our campus have this item?
Questions about authority control
Questions that stem from the way campuses have cataloged items that yield surprising results
Problems with firewalls
Cataloging errors (which are referred to the campuses)
Questions about recalling books (also referred to the campuses)
Questions about limiting to languages at a particular campus, and why the results are the way they are. (Remember, you can limit to a language using Command searching, e.g., wln = tib and wid = ucd. This search limits retrievals to materials in Tibetan at UC Davis. Looking at the MARC record will show you that sometimes materials are written in more than one language, e.g., "Text in English and Tibetan, with abstract in Chinese".)
Problems when services go down, either at the CDL or at the campuses
Who is the Dear Abby of the Melvyl feedbacks? Jayne Dickson pens those sometimes amazingly complex answers to your questions. Although she sometimes comes to the Melvyl Team for help in answering them, Jayne is a whiz at combing through the MARC record to untangle why a certain record displays when it does.
Melvyl feedback messages are important because they confirm some things we already know; help us discover other unknown issues and problems; put us into the mysterious minds of our users; and assist in our quest to improve Melvyl.