Help with using the catalogue
Once you have logged in to the Catalogue, GeoWeb Help is available via a button on the left hand side of the screen. There are three main indexes, author, title and subject, and two main kinds of search: Browse, which provides a scrollable alphabetised view of the index concerned starting at the leftmost character (excluding articles in the title index); and Keyword, which allows searching for a particular word or set of words (right truncatable with the ? character) at any point in the index. You can combine keywords from different indexes by using the Advanced button in the keyword search screen, and in the same screen you can set search limits to restrict your query by publication date, language, or material type. You can also mark selected records and email them back to yourself for future use. Some more searches are detailed below.
Special searches on Chetham's Catalogue
In addition to the familiar Browse and Keyword searches for authors, titles and subjects, Chetham's Library OPAC provides some additional functionality in its cataloguing of works printed prior to 1801:
Binding and Provenance information
Bindings of interest, and significant features showing provenance and ownership history have been indexed using terms drawn from the RBMS Thesauri for use in rare books and special collections cataloging. These terms can be browsed or keyword searched from the Subject index of the catalogue. Examples of such terms include:
Blind tooled bindings (Binding) -- England -- Winchester -- 15th century
Inscriptions (Provenance) -- Belgium -- Louvain -- 17th century
Additional name searches
In addition to these index terms, the names of printers, booksellers, binders and former owners of works have been entered into the author index where identifiable. They can be browsed or searched by keyword in the same way as other entries in the author index.
Place of publication index
The place of publication index is now available in addition to the author, title and subject indexes. It is organised alphabetically and hierarchically in the order [Modern Country name] -- [Modern Town or city name]. You can browse or keyword search it like the other indexes, and when using keywords you can apply date or language limits as mentioned above: thus a keyword search under 'Paris' in this index, date limited to 1540-1601 and language limited to Latin would provide a list of works published at Paris within the years 1540-1601 inclusive and in, or mainly in the Latin language. The names of countries and of towns and cities follow modern English language usage. If a particular keyworded name does not provide the expected results, please browse the index.