Remember when you needed to find a book and you would look for it in Online Public Access Catalogs
the card catalog? You would head to the familiar cabinet with all the index cards in drawers, and you could look up either the title of the book (if you could remember it!) or the author (if you knew the name and could spell it!). Most academic institutions and large libraries have greatly improved this antiquated system with computer technology.
An Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) is a computerized database of a library's holdings. In most libraries, OPACs have replaced the card catalog. Libraries often name their OPACs, and the one at F. D. Bluford is called Innopac.
OPACs offer several advantages over the traditional card catalog. For example, there are more advanced searching options than the usual author, title, and subject. In addition, a computerized system enables a library to offer remote access to the catalog - that is, access from outside the physical library - enabling you to search from your home computer.
A record in an OPAC represents a book, a video cassette, a compact disk, or other library materials. Each library decides what type of materials, other than books, are contained in its database or OPAC. Of course, there are magazines, maps, and newspapers, but there may also be videos, films, photographs, sound recordings, or art. Each of these items has its own record. The format (whether videocassette, cdrom, etc.) is identified in the description field. Look at the Description and Contents fields in the following record.
The contents field contains a list of speech titles and the name of the person who delivered the speech. This information would be useful for students taking public speaking and history classes. Notice the material type indicated by the brackets. All sound records, video recordings, or computer files will have a label for material type.
The next record represents the book Harriet Tubman. Notice all the different fields on the left side of the record. Whenever you do a search, you have the option of limiting your search to a particular field
In the record above, "Tubman, Harriet" is listed in the subject heading field. This is because the book is about her, not written by her. The Author of the book is Marian Taylor.
If you have an English assignment to read books by a particular author, you enter the author's last name, after selecting Author under "Catalog Search By:" on the Home Page.
If, however, you are supposed to find critical works or commentary about the author, you enter the name, but as a Subject search.
