Copying & Pasting Searches in GIL

Copying and pasting a title to use for a search in GIL is a great little time saver, particularly when checking for duplicates on your order slips, but there is a caveat. When copying and pasting from a webpage, you can carry over formatting that will cause your search to bomb out even if we own the title.

For example, we have McGraw-Hill’s GMAT. If you copy and paste that title into a GIL Classic exact title search, as is, you'll get a "no matches found" message, even though we own it. When you copy the title, you're getting a formatted, as opposed to plain text, apostrophe. GIL Classic is very literal, especially in the exact search. This is why it's more precise than GIL Find, but also more demanding. If you remove the apostrophe and search on McGraw-Hills GMAT (or delete the apostrophe and retype, which will be plain text), you'll get two hits.

This premise applies to any sort of potentially formatted punctuation, accent marks, etc. If you remove anything like that from a copy and paste search, it won't bomb out unless we really don't own the title.

The above applies only to GIL Classic. GIL-Find seems to just ignore punctuation. However, I'm not 100% certain of that. If you have a copy and paste search bomb out, in any catalog or search interface, and you feel like it shouldn't have, removing any punctuation and accent marks is always a good first step.

The Status of the Withdrawn Status

We’ve had some problems recently with patrons being sent to other campuses to get items that turned out to be withdrawn, so I wanted to take a second to go over that status and how it currently displays.

When items are withdrawn from the collection, they are given the item status of “Withdrawn”, which allows me to run a report and pull them out for Sonya, who removes/suppresses the records in the catalog and takes our holdings off of the WorldCat record, if necessary.

Now, unfortunately, this item status doesn’t display in GIL Classic. That’s why people withdrawing items have to add the temporary location of “WITHDRAWN,” in addition to the item status. This temporary location does display in GIL Classic. We’ve put it in all caps to make it as noticeable as possible, and it's pretty large, but that’s the best we can do given the limitations of the software.



Now, GIL-Find is a little more flexible about statuses than GIL Classic, and I’ve been working with the server site to get statuses to display in a more meaningful way. When the new code rolls out soon, we may even start seeing “Withdrawn” in GIL-Find. Here’s a screenshot from the testing code.



Whether they’re using GIL-Find or GIL Classic, please look for this temporary location and/or status in the holdings record before telling someone an item is available and remind your part-time staff to do so. Patrons have gotten understandably upset after driving to another campus for a book that wasn’t there.

Thanks everyone! Please let me know if you have any questions.