I’ve noticed, while helping students use the MyiLibrary to access eBooks, that many users are having difficulty getting relevant results, if they are getting any at all. This mainly has to do with how the search is set with our eBook collection.
When one goes to the MyiLibrary, which can be reached by clicking on the “eBook Collection” icon on the Library Catalog page or under the “Find Books” tab at www.inside-wcui.com/library, there’s a search bar on the top right of the screen. Plugging terms into this generally isn’t very helpful. Only titles and descriptions of books can be searched through this bar, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the breadth of topics covered in a work. For example, if “multiple sclerosis” is searched for in this box, no results will be returned—this doesn’t mean, however, that we don’t have any books that deal with the subject.
The full-text of the eBooks can be searched, however. Under the standard search box, there is a link that says “Advanced Search.” When clicked on, this link takes the user to a page that has several search boxes, the top four of which will search for the terms entered into them through the text of the books in our collection. Going back to our example of Multiple Sclerosis, when searching the full-text, 35 books are returned.
Keep this in mind when utilizing our eBook collection for the class projects, and make sure to utilize the much more useful advanced search features of the site.
~Andrew