Quicksearch became the featured search box on the Music Library’s website this summer. Quicksearch is a search interface that allows researchers to search across a variety of library resources, presenting results from three groups: Books+, which searches across the two library catalogs (Orbis and Morris); Articles+, which searches across ejournals and other electronic resources; and Digital Collections, which searches across digitized rare materials in several of the library’s collections.
Useful for browsing our collections, Quicksearch has facets within each of the three groups that allow you to narrow down results by format (books, scores, audio, etc.), library, date, personal and corporate names, and subject headings. Can’t remember when to use the singular and when to use the plural of form and genre terms as you have to do in Orbis? Have no fear – Quicksearch searches across both. For those more comfortable with the standard Orbis interface, it is not going away, and a link is available on the Music Library’s home page. Library staff have created several guides to Quicksearch: the Help link in the upper right of the screen when using Quicksearch; and the Music Library’s guide Music Research @ Yale. If you have questions about Quicksearch or need help searching, contact Suzanne Lovejoy or Jonathan Manton. Quicksearch is a work in progress! Suzanne is Co-Chair of a recently formed Quicksearch Advisory Group, with representation from across the library, that seeks to identify and prioritize improvements to the service.