Getting the most out of our catalogue search tools
This guide will help you learn how to get the best results when using the catalogue search tools at Hume Libraries.
Hume Libraries is part of the Libraries Victoria network, this means that our members can place holds directly on items held at other library services through our app and online catalogue.
When you search for items, our systems will default to look for the item within Hume’s collection first, but you can easily expand the search to the almost 1 million items available through the Libraries Victoria shared collection. Read on to see how you can navigate search through our online catalogue and library app.
Online Catalogue
- Enter your search term in the search bar and click ‘search’
- At the top of the results page, you will see two tabs, ‘Hume City Libraries’ and ‘Shared Collections’
- If you can’t see what your looking for in the ‘Hume City Libraries’ tab, you can expand the results by clicking ‘Shared Collections’, this will expand the search to the other libraries that are part of the sharing network.
- You can then select the ‘place hold’ button to have the title reserved for pickup at your local branch.
- If there are no results for your search with Hume Libraries collection, the system will automatically expand the search.
In the example below, we can see that the results under ‘Hume City Libraries’ aren’t the titles we’ve searched for.
By clicking ‘Shared Collections’, we’ve found the title available at another library service. We can now place a hold on this title.
Library App search
- Enter your search term (Title, Author or Subject) and tap ‘search'.
- The search results will automatically have the filter ‘Hume City Libraries’ applied. This appears as blue box underneath the search bar.
- By tapping the ‘x’, you can remove the Hume Libraries filter to expand the search to the Libraries Victoria shared collection.
Using Talpa smart search
We are trialing a new experimental search tool that uses AI technology to help find titles using natural language queries rather than specific title/author search terms. This tool is great if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, or if you would like to find books with specific features. You can also use this tool to search for books based on the colour and other features of the cover, handy for when you don’t remember the title of book but know that it was blue and had a picture of a dog on the cover.
You can access the Talpa search tool by clicking on the icon in the top right-hand corner of the Online Catalogue screen.
Talpa search will load in a new window and you can search for books or via cover search under the appropriate tabs.