While Discover is an intuitive catalogue, there are some key concepts with which you might want to familiarize yourself. These concepts will assist in making Discover even easier to use because you’ll understand the key components of the catalogue, and enable you to share your knowledge with patrons.

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation is a way of refining or filtering your search results based on information pulled from those resulting records after the search is completed. The refine menu that appears on the right side of the screen after every search in Discover is where you'll see Faceted Navigation in action. This menu separates the content of the records into sections, or facets (ie. Format, Topic, Genre, Reading level, Author) and displays the specific elements that correspond to each section (ie. book, DVD, e-book, CD, etc. for Format ; or mystery fiction, thrillers, romance films, biographies, Canadian fiction, etc. for genre). Faceted navigation allows us to pull out and sort this kind of valuable information that used to be hidden in our records and was, consequently, difficult to search. Discover does not require that you use specific or complicated search terms; you can start with the most basic of searches, and then refine your way to the most relevant results.

Federated Searching

Federated searching prevents a user from having to perform the same search in multiple locations, and retrieves information and records from all sources we have available in a single search. For example, when you perform a search in Discover, you'll notice a heading just above your search results that says Magazine/Newspaper articles, etc. The number that appears beside this heading indicates the number of articles found within our various database, journal, magazine and newspapers subscriptions. Clicking on Show hits will allow you to sort through these various subscriptions and view the articles that were retrieved based on your search. Although we do not host or catalogue these individual articles on our Horizon database, they are still searched when we use Discover.  (As a point of comparison, our old catalogue, HIP, does require that you search for articles separately). The same case applies to our Community Resources (ComRes) database. This exists as a separate layer within Horizon, but it is only accessible to those who add to and edit it. However, Discover will retrieve ComRes records - for organizations, classes, programs, etc. - in a search as well. .

My Discoveries

My Discoveries (MD) is the social, collaborative feature that allows users and staff to tag, review and rate items within the catalogue. MD also enables users to create lists (public or private depending on preference) of their favourite items, or to organize their reading, listening and viewing interests. In an effort to ensure a level of privacy, MD requires the user to create a separate user account that is not associated with their library borrowing account, so make sure to remember the difference between the two accounts. Once an account is created, users can interact with and contribute to content in the catalogue.

Discover Word Cloud

Another feature of Discover is its Discover Word Cloud. It can be viewed at any time after performing a search by clicking on the Show Word Cloud tab at the top left of your search results screen. This word cloud provides a visual display of terms and words associated with a search in a variety of contexts. Words may be presented because they are proximity terms, translations, word associations or spelling variations. The term in the center of the cloud indicates the term that is currently reflected in your search. However, there is a “breadcrumb” trail that allows a user to trace their search history. This is called the Discovery Trail. The word cloud's choice of related terms may not always make a lot of sense, but it helps to know that it functions more adequately when your search consists of single terms. It's called the Discover Word Cloud because it helps you discover new materials through various connections between materials. Typing the full title of a book into the search box will not generate entirely useful associative terms in the word cloud. Try, for an example, searching for Freud, arctic or vegetables and then opening the Word Cloud after each search; note that the word cloud seems a little more relevant. Clicking on one of the associated terms in black will narrow your results to those that contain both that and your initial search term.

Bibliographic Record

A bibliographic record is the catalogue record used to represent a title in our collection. These records contain all of the data that is searched when using Discover, and all of the elements that appear in the Refine Menu are pulled from that data.

Full Bib Display

The “Full Bib Display” is what you see when you click on a title in the catalogue (in the search results list) and the entire bibliographic record appears. Title, author, publishing information, summaries, subject headings, holdings and a wealth of additional information are available in this display.

Short Bib Display

The “Short Bib Display” is the record display that is seen in a search results lists. This is a shortened version of the full bibliographic record, containing essential elements from the full bibliographic record (usually title, primary author, publisher, summary and call number).

Single search box

Like the search box in Google, Discover uses a single search box that can search any sources of information that the library chooses to implement. As mentioned above, when performing a search, our catalogue retrieves results from our bibliographic records (the library’s holdings), community resources database, and subscription databases, journals, magazines and newspapers.

Community Resources Database (ComRes)

HPL’s community resources database contains data on community groups and organizations within HRM, as well as information on volunteer opportunities, recreational activities, programs and classes being offered in the area, meeting room spaces and a variety of other community-focused information. When you search Discover, ComRes records will appear with a Community Groups/Programs icon beside them, which differentiates them from records for books, DVDs, etc.

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