Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Library Anywhere – more than just keyword search

When we first launched, Library Anywhere let you quickly and easily search your catalog using just the general keyword search. To a degree I still think this is the right default, especially for mobile when you want quick and dirty browsing. But for many OPACs, just the general keyword search wasn’t great, wasn’t enough, or wasn’t giving the best results.

We’ve now added the ability for a library to choose to include their “search type” dropdown menu in Library Anywhere. It uses the exact same search type menu as your OPAC, so you’ll have those same options—e.g. search by author, title, subject, etc.

As you can see in the pictures below, to save screen space, the dropdown menu doesn’t appear until you click in the search box.

We hope this makes searching Library Anywhere all the better.

Labels: library anywhere, librarything for libraries, mobile, mobile catalog

4 Comments:

  1. Is there any sort of end-user help for Library Anywhere? I am trying to evaluate the product on a Samsung Android phone using the Android app and it isn’t fuctional (session has expired and the menu to clear all settings can’t be selected).

  2. Abby says:

    Hi Michael,

    My apologies – we’re working on an Android bug that just cropped up (which you clearly ran into) right now… It should be functional again soon. In the meantime, if you go to libanywhere.com/m on your desktop computer you’ll see the iPhone version, or libanywhere.com/la for the universal version.

    Abby