I
have been saving books on the online library catalogue over the last few
evenings on my account, but when I view saved items the
majority have disappeared. Apart from those this evening.
On
my DISCOVER account, all bookmarks are present throughout my research. I
thought this would also be the case with the library catalogue.
Could
you please advise or clear up my confusion?
Thank you for your enquiry. Firstly, I see from your email that
you’re using DISCOVER’s folder feature to save bookmarks. All the records on
the library catalogue are also on DISCOVER so you can save book records from
there directly. This will save you the bother of going to two different
websites; one search covers all the catalogue and the education resources.
And the bookmarks will be saved to your personal account permanently,
unless you actively delete them. There is a filter feature on the left-hand
menu that lets you limit results to books only, if your search expression
retrieves thousands of results (having trawled journals or newspapers). When
you want to activate a reservation to an item, DISCOVER will link back to the
catalogue so you pick the site you want it sent to etc.
The library catalogue’s save function is session-specific, even
if you sign in. When you click on the View Saved button, you have the choice to
export the items or view/reserve them. In a session, a user might tag (or
‘save’) items to cherry-pick titles to Reserve (for collection when they are
next on campus, for example). To use an online shopping analogy, you might
select a product on the Argos or M&S website one day and a browser cookie
will keep it tagged for a limited period, but it won’t stay in the shopping
cart indefinitely.
The catalogue’s Export saved record feature lets you push a
session’s records into a referencing management system, like the university’s
preferred system (RefWorks).
An RMS lets you securely save reference data and gives you extra features (like
folder management or inputting into Word documents). And it is a stable,
web-based system so you can securely save your records. But, again, that is
something that you can do within DISCOVER so it is a rarely used feature on the
catalogue.
A member of staff at the Academic Liaison Librarian drop in
http://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/studyhub/drop-in
would be
happy to give you extra help with using RefWorks (and/or DISCOVER) to manage
your references securely; the Word plug-in is particularly handy for
assignments. These web pages would also be of value
http://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/digital/discover
http://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/guides/a-guide-to-referencing/RefWorks_Intro
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