CDL has recently added new features to the online catalog to give you more searching power and greater access to our items!

Your ability to search and access materials by Title, Author, Subject and Keyword have not changed, we’ve merely added more content to your results pages. You will now see similar authors/titles, a Virtual Browser, user reviews and a series box if the item is part of a collection.

We hope that these enhancements will give you, the patron, a better library experience and help us to serve you better! You can use the table of contents on this article to explore the new features. As always, please feel free to Contact Us if you have questions.

The Valley Library Consortium (the people who provide our catalog service) made a great video overview of all of the upgrades.

Find Similar Books
Many readers have favorite authors and hang on every word ever published, craving the next book in the series. But what do you do with yourself in between those books? Read-alike lists have been compiled and used by librarians for years and now you have the same tool at the click of your mouse and built right into our catalog!
Once you have entered the item record, you will see a section called “Similar Books” that will offer titles that have the same theme or is in the same genre as the title you’re currently viewing. For example, when viewing a James Patterson book, you will see titles by David Baldacci or John Sandford displayed. You can easily navigate to that title by clicking on book cover.

Virtual Shelf Browser

Just as if you were standing in front of our shelves, you can now virtually browse our collection! When viewing an item record, you can see the smaller virtual shelf browser or click the “full screen” browser for a larger view of the books held in our catalog that would sit on the shelf next to the item at which you are currently looking. Just like if you were in our libraries, you can easily browse by author name or Dewey classification to find other similar or related items that you might not be able to find as easily just by searching. Part of the fun of coming to the library is the discovery that takes place while browsing the shelves. Now you can do it from the comfort of home on your computer! See the Virtual Shelf Browser in action!

User Reviews

You’re probably familiar with user reviews from websites like Amazon.com. You now have user reviews available to you on our catalog! At the bottom of the item information section, you will now find user reviews to help guide your decisions. Do you have an opinion about an item you want to share? Post it! Share what you think about items in our catalog and help your fellow patrons make educated choices. This is what libraries are all about, sharing! Take a look at User Reviews in action.

Series Section

One of the most important enhancements we are please to offer helps you find information about items in a series. Have you ever checked out a book from the library only to find it’s part of a series and as chance would have it, it’s NOT the first book? Well, now our catalog will guide you by telling you the order of the items in a given series! For instance, you keep hearing about James Patterson’s Double Cross and know it’s a series but want to know which book to start on? In the item record, it will show you the ENTIRE series starting with Along Came a Spider! You can jump to the catalog record for a given item in the series simply by clicking on the cover. From there, it’s simple to order the item so it can be delivered to your local library for you to pick up.

One of the easiest ways to find out about a series is to use the book’s ISBN to find the item in the catalog and then you’ll see the series information. Use the Exact Searches on the catalog and then enter in the ISBN into the corresponding box. Take a look at how it’s done!

We hope that you’ll find the new enhancements to the CDL catalog as exciting and useful as we do. Please let us know what you think and enjoy!