Search Tips

These helpful search tips are taken from the CLCD Monthly News, the electronic newsletter of CLCD. Subscriptions to the newsletter are free and help keep you updated on new features added to the CLCD database as well as new items available at the Children's Literature web site. To sign up, click here.

Awards and Prizes

CLCD has passed another milestone. There are more than 400,000 value added entries in the 1.2 million cataloging records that constitute the database. These entries indicate if a book has won an award or prize; appeared on a "best books list;" has been selected for a state or provincial reading list; assigned a reading measurement value; received a Horn Book Guide Rating; or has a link to an author or illustrator web page. What sets us apart is that all of this information is full text searchable and most of it can be obtained by clicking a hot link. Want to know who won an award in a given year or what books may be on a reading list this year? First find out how the award is listed in the database, then enter the text (cut and paste) in the search box and next you then broaden or narrow your search by looking for specific years. For example, if you enter Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, 2000 and click exact phrase, it will give you the list of books that meet that criteria which you can then sort by title, author, date, etc.

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Abbreviated Names

When searching for an author with a name that sometimes appears in an abbreviated form, such as Chris instead of Christopher or Tony instead of Anthony, do try searching both versions, especially if you have selected to limit your search to the author/illustrator fields. We use the cataloging records provided by the Library of Congress and others organizations that prepare them for materials the Library of Congress does not catalog or may not have cataloged yet. Therefore, the name authority file may not always be consulted or consistent.

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CLCD B&N Bookstore

When you are looking at the information about a book and need to know more—such as the current price or availability—click on the CLCD B&N Bookstore button at the top or bottom of the page. It will take you directly to that item where you can get product information and lots more. You can then just hit the Back button to return to whatever you were doing in the CLCD database. Should you wish to make a purchase later on, remember that doing so from the CLCD database earns you an extra 5% discount.

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Printing Search Results

When using Internet Explorer, you will find that the frames print out separately. For each page of results printed, you get one sheet of paper with the navigation buttons, and one with the results that you have selected. To avoid wasting paper and to get the print out that you want, go to print preview instead of print. There you will see a pull down window which offers three options:

• as laid out
  
• only selected frames
  
• all frames individually
  

You can see what each one will do as you select them. I recommend that you select as laid out if you want the navigation information to appear or only selected frames (to make the latter work so that you don't get the navigation information you need to click in the text portion that you want to print before going to print preview, then choose only selected frames).

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ISBN Search

For a quick way to locate unrelated titles just key in the ISBN numbers in the search box without the dashes and with one space between each string. To illustrate: 0688160263 1887734872 will bring up the following books: Big Jimmy's Kum Kau Chinese Take-Out and Sammy Wakes His Dad. It is recommended to do no more than 10 at a time to eliminate frustration in case of a keying error. Remember if you select and copy and paste text into the search box you avoid keying errors which will save lots of time. Also if you just click on modify search whatever you have keyed remains in the search box.

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New Search

Sometimes a search will yield a message that says no records were found, but you know that cannot be true. What could be going wrong? What's probably happening is that you did not start out with a cleared search screen. It's very easy to do a search, look at the results, and then use the back button to do another search. However, if you selected one specific genre or some other qualifier on the prior search, your new search may still include that qualifier. To avoid this type of problem, we recommend you make it a point to use the NEW SEARCH button on the results display in such circumstances instead of the BACK button.

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Search Lexile Score & Subject Term Together

If you need to search for a specific Lexile score and combine it with a subject term, you can do it just by putting the information in the search box. For example, baseball lexile 540 brings up four books about baseball that meet that criteria and two additional ones that mention baseball in the review. Anytime you want to check what you keyed in as your search criteria click on detail in the menu list on the left side of the screen and the pop-up window will show what you keyed in the search box.

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Searching for Picture Books

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Book Jacket Images

Each time you use the database you will see more jacket images. Please note that we have just begun to load them, so while there are many thousand available there are many more thousand to put up. We know that this is a feature that has been requested but many subscribers, and we are delighted to be able to bring book jacket images to you.

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Selecting Your Screen Resolution

If the CLCD search screen doesn’t look as nicely organized on your computer as it did when you first saw a demonstration of the service, it may be that your computer's video resolution is set to standard VGA mode (640x480). The CLCD search screen has been optimized for display on monitors where the resolution has been set to SuperVga (800x600). Although still functional, the search screen will not be displayed as nicely by the browser at the lower resolution.

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Sort Function

JavaScripts provide the ability to sort the records in the results set and to select and save specific records found by the search. A pop-up window will appear that will allow you to resequence the records in the results set. Accept the default which will resequence the records in descending order based on publication date. Click on the SORT button to complete the resequencing operation. Result: The records in the results set are now presented in reverse chronological order by date of publication.

You may sort by date, title, author, language, Dewey number, or LC number in either ascending or descending order. NOTE: You must be using a version 4 browser with JavaScript support enabled for the sort function to be available on the Search results page.

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Searching for Specific Awards

The database contains more than 200,000 entries for awards, best book lists, state reading lists and the like. If you are looking for a specific award, here is one of the easiest ways to do it. Select a book that you know has won the award and then click the hot link for that award. It will bring up all of the current and past award winners. Searching can sometimes be difficult because the award names change slightly (it is not typos on our part, the names really do change). Also the organizations sponsoring or supporting the award may change and they may introduce a slight variation in the name of the award. We have up-to-date coverage for US and Canadian awards and we are aggressively seeking out the information for current international awards. If you know of any award that we may have missed, please do contact us and we will do our best to get the information added.

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Publisher's Name in Results

Please note that we have modified the results display so that the publisher's name appears in the results list. This will help to easily identify large print editions, paperbacks, specialty bound editions, and the like. It will eliminate what may on the surface appear to be duplicates and also will eliminate the necessity to click on the record to see the publisher name. We hope that helps and welcome all of your suggestions.

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Author or Illustrator Feature Links

This new icon will indicate that the featured author or illustrator has a link to a feature done by Children's Literature or to the author/illustrator’s personal web site. That’s more than 30,000 links to over 1,200 web references and features! Just click wherever this icon appears and you will be able to access specific information about authors and illustrators and the work they produce for children.

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Books for the Blind and Dyslexic

A new section was added to the database that identifies if a book has been recorded for the blind and dyslexic. Information is available for eligible students to obtain these audio versions of the books. The phrase "Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic" appears in the results list.

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Creating a List of Selected Titles

The question posed was how can I create a list of book titles to send out for our state children's award or a summer reading list. Also, we have lists from several sources and I need to combine all of them into one single list sorted by title.

If you undertake the following steps you can prepare a formatted list using the database and your word processing program. In this case I used MICROSOFT WORD.

1. Perform your search either by subject, author, ISBN, date, whatever criteria you choose. In this case if you have the ISBN numbers, the search process will go very quickly.
   
2. When you have the results list, check off the items that you want in your list.
   
3. Save checked items.
   
4. Display checked items to confirm that is what you want.
   
5. Click on Custom Report Button and accept the HTML default, change the length to 3 or 400 characters so you can get the entire annotation if you want it included. Number the six fields in the sequence you want them to appear (you don't need to use them all if you don't need them) and click create report. The result is a nicely formatted.
   
6. Start Word and copy this table and paste into a WORD document which will create a word table.
   

Now if you want to add more items just repeat steps 1-5 and when you go to WORD delete the blank line between the two tables, at this point you can also delete the header row in the second table. What you have done is concatenated two tables to create one larger table. You can just keep building until you get all of the items you want in the table. To manipulate the table in Word, requires a few extra steps. (If you are not comfortable working with Word tables, you will need to consult help).

If you want you list arranged by title you will need to go in and manipulate the titles to make the articles, appear last (he titles are coming from the MARC records so we do not control how the library of Congress formats the data). You can also use the case changing ability in Word if you want to use the title case option.

You can use table commands to search this table using any of the existing fields. (Note: If you had not deleted the header row for all of the table pieces they will all sort to the top and can be easily deleted).

You can resize the fields however you want them to display or print.

Voila! A beautifully formatted list.

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