Sort and Format your search results; save your Preferences

Sort options

If you do a search that retrieves a large number of records, you will see a display box listing the first ten of these records in order by publication year, with the most recent ones first. But if this order doesn't suit you, you have many other options.

For example: do a keyword search, entering the word Mennonite and choosing the Subject field. You retrieve 100 records, of which you can view ten at a time. They are listed in order by publication year. But notice the line near the top of the screen labelled Sort options.

This rather confusing display indicates that your search results are ordered first by year, then by author. That means you will see the most recently published works at the top of the screen. But if there are three or four items all published in 1999 for example, they will be sub-ordered alphabetically by author's name.

You can choose to re-order all of 100 of your results by any of the other combinations of criteria and sub-criteria. Experiment to see which order suits your purposes at a given time.

If you don't feel the need for sub-criteria, there is a simpler way to re-order your results. Note the underlined column headings pictured below.

You can simply click on one of those underlined headings to re-order all of your results by alphabetically by author's name, or by the first word in the title. Or, click on Year to put them in order by publication year again.

Format options

Look again at the first illustration on this page, above. Note the line labelled Format options. For some reason, our catalog lists these in an extremely cryptic way. The purpose of these options is to change the way your search results are displayed.

The default setting of our catalog places groups of records in a blue box with columns, which it calls Brief view-table. That display is adequate, but you need not accept it; there are several choices. With the search on Mennonite used above, try clicking on one of the Format options -- for example, number 953.

Now, instead of the blue box with columns, you have a list of works in a citation format, showing the author, title and call number (the Brief view-table format does not show call numbers). Also, the underlined links are active, so clicking on Yoder, John Howard will bring up a list of all other works in our collection by that author.

Preferences

If you wish, you can decide on your favorite Sort and Format options, and then have them saved for you. If you are not logged in, these choices will be saved only until the end of your search session. But if you are logged in with your own user ID barcode number, these choices will be saved permanently (until you change them) and will be seen every time you log in. The Preferences link is found near the top of the page.

You are presented with several choices. You may first choose No. of brief records per page. If your search retrieves a whole lot of records, you can decide how many you wish to view at once, in a short-form display. The default setting is 10.

You may also choose Max no. of records for Auto Full. That apparently meaningless expression indicates that you have the option of viewing all of your records in full display, not a short form; each complete bibliographic record will be presented, one after another. It seems some people prefer this. The default is set at 0.

You can also choose Format, one of those from the options described above. The default is the blue box called Brief view-table, but you could choose option 953 instead.

The last choice involves authority records, and we recommend that you leave that option set on Yes.