New Online Medical Library Catalog Adds Power to Searches

Five Texas Medical Center libraries and one library in Galveston will be equipped with a new, online catalog system later this month, that will enable users to conduct more powerful medical searches than ever before. Texas Health Science Libraries Consortium will implement the new Voyager online catalog system, which replaces the current, 10-year-old online catalog and circulation system. The consortium includes the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health, Dental Branch and Psychiatry Libraries, The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Research Medical Library, and The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston Moody Medical Library.

Book and journal holdings from all six libraries will be included in the new system, and the move will provide online catalog searchers with much greater power and flexibility. Users will be able to:

• perform keyword searching with results ranked by relevancy;
• browse collections by topic or call number;
• limit searches to a specific type of material (e.g., videorecording);
• qualify results by library; then, sort items by year;
• use Voyager’s "history" feature to access previous sets of search results;
• mark items while searching for output when finished; and
• easily print, download, and e-mail search results.

As a result of this change, users will have better access to both traditional and digital library collections, and a library system much more capable of taking advantage of new technologies as they emerge.

Voyager is also used by the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Information Agency, and almost 1,000 other libraries around the world.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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