Because of the pressure on space in the departmental library on the ground floor (not to mention the long walk there and back!), it has been suggested that the group/class library might be moved upstairs to level 6.
Rather than have all the books in one room, they're could be distributed between the offices on level 6, with various `keepers' being given responsibility for issuing and recovering them. The general procedure would be that you will search for a book using the on-line catalogue, find the book's serial number and its keeper, and trot along to the keeper, who will give you the book and record it as borrowed.
I anticipate that the principal interface to the library will be the
WWW search page, though there is a
menu-driven interface on the Suns (give the command
deptlib and take it from there). The WWW interface
should be self-explanatory....
The searching of the catalogue is done by a WAIS server: this means that you should be able to give as search terms, all the words you can think of about a subject or a particular book, and if they appear in a book's catalogue entry, that entry will be on the list of catalogue records returned to you after a search. The list that's returned to you is sorted so that the records which most closely match your search appear first. There's very little more to it than that.
Right now (February 1995), the library is in some disarray. I hope everything will be sorted out when a stocktake next happens, but until then, if you borrow a book from the library, could you mail deptlib that you've done so.
This is a rather simple program, really, and so it shouldn't do too much wrong (hah!). If you find anything goes wrong, or if you have any suggestions at all, please do let me know.