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What is the EC catalogue?

Our catalogue is part of a statewide network called TALIS, which is used by most school and college libraries in Tasmania, as well as TAFE and the State Library of Tasmania.

How do I use it?

Step 1

Choose the catalogue you want to search.
Normally you would select the Elizabeth College option, but you can also choose to search our Aboriginal Education or ESL collections (part of E.C. Library but listed as separate collections). Other useful options include the State Library collection, the Hobart TAFE or the Secondary College collections.

Simple keyword Search

This is the easiest place to start searching for items in the TALIS catalogue.
Keywords
‘Keywords’ are words in the catalogue record which are indexed and can be used to find items held by the particular library you are searching
Words such as ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, ‘that’ and ‘of’ are not indexed. If you use them, they won’t affect your search.

Step 2

Type one or more search words in the ‘Search for’ box. If you type two or more words, TALIS will search for ALL of them. Searching for a single very common word like ‘history’ will retrieve too many records.
TALIS treats upper and lower case letters as the same and ignores commas and full stops. Hyphens are treated like spaces, eg. ‘trade-in’ searches for ‘trade’ and ‘in’ as 2 separate words.

Truncation: You can use ? to truncate (shorten) words in order to find different forms of the same word, eg; Tasman? retrieves Tasmania, Tasmanian, Tasmanians and Tasmania's.

You must enter at least the first 3 letters of the word for truncation to work, eg. tas?

Using ‘and’ ‘not’ and ‘or’ to link search options. If you are not sure which word has been used to describe your topic, you can put in several words using the ‘or’ search option. For example, “alzheimers or dementia”; “football or soccer”.

Alternatively, if you want information on a range of mental illnesses but don’t want Alzheimer's, you can try “mental illness? not Alzheimer's”. This will then find ‘mental illnesses’ also due to the use of the truncation sign.

The ‘and’ can be for such things as narrowing a search to a particular country eg. “mental illness? and Australia?” will then search only for items that have Australia or Australian in the record.

Step 3

You must select a “field” or “index” to search on from the drop down list beside your search box. These include ’all words’, ‘title/series’, ’author’ and ‘subjects’.

ALL words : This search is very broad and is particularly useful because it searches across all the fields at once.

ALL WORDS search on ‘first fleet’:
A basic all words search for first fleet provided 19 ‘hits’ or potential resources, whereas the same search on the subject field only resulted in 12 ‘hits’. 

The all words option got better results because it looks for the search term/s across the entire record, allowing for more potential “hits”.

All words searches are also good because they find specific words or phrases that may not necessarily appear in a title or subject. For example, a subject search for “world population statistics found ‘0’ results, whereas an all words search found ‘2’ relevant resources.

Although all words is a preferred option for many searches, try not to use common words such as “history” or “handbook” as this will get too many irrelevant records.


Title/series : choose this if you know the exact title or series that you are looking for. If you know, for instance that it is one of the ‘lonely planet’ series, then select this option. If you do not know the exact title or series, then either use truncation to help eg. lone? planet?, or select the all words option .

Author : choose this if you know the author’s name, for example, roald dahl (no need to capitalise). You can also use dahl, roald , or even truncate part of the name if you are unsure of the spelling eg roa? dah?

Subjects : all TALIS catalogues throughout Tasmania use subject headings which use North American spelling and terminology. If you are doing a subject search, you need to use ‘railroads’ instead of ‘railways’ and that ‘color’ is preferable to the Australian spelling of ‘colour’.

Step 4

Full record and holdings information.
Once you have entered your search terms, click on the Submit Search button and a list of results will appear on your screen similar to the example in step 3.

If a title looks promising, you then need to click on the Full Record option to the left of the title and it will take you to a more detailed outline of the item. This includes publishing details, subject headings used and the call number of the item, from which you can then locate the resource on the shelf.

Step 5

Locating the resource/s you need using the holdings information.
Library holdings information appears beneath the details of the item you have selected. This will allow you to find it on the shelf. The next three boxes have the collection, call no. and the status (availability) of the item you are searching for.

Collections :
Some examples include: ‘Main’ - bulk of the non fiction, ‘Fiction’ - reading or story books, ‘Reference’ - resources to be used in the Library only, ‘Reserve’- resources in high demand (overnight loan only), ‘Serials’ - magazines, ‘DOE-ESL’- English as a Second Language, ‘DOE-Aboriginal’- Aboriginal Education.

Call Number :
Dewey numbers run from 000 to 999. Each number refers to a particular subject, for example, 994 has the Australian history resources.

Fiction books, however, use the first three letters of an author’s surname and are therefore arranged alphabetically on the shelves, eg novel by John Marsden can be found at F MAR.

Status :
‘On Shelf’ means the resource is available on the shelves. A due date in this box means the resource is on loan.