TOPCAT Tutorial

Simple Webpage
Interactive Slide show

If you haven't used TOPCAT extensively, you might want to take a look at this tutorial. It covers all the basics in using TOPCAT.

Choose the access that best suits your learning style and computer access. (You'll need Flash for the slideshow.)

Effective Keywords

For a keyword search we may want to truncate nursing to nurs$ so that it will include nurse or nurses or nursing.

If we search for "nurs$" in a keyword search in TOPCAT, we find over 2000 items. It's too broad a search. Add "nurs$" with a more specific topic and we get something more meaningful:

Trent Library uses the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCHS). These provide clear guidelines into how we can identify our books by subject. There are several ways in which nursing subjects could be represented, such as:

In TOPCAT in the Full Details view of a record of a book you can view the Subject Headings. To find books of a similar subject, you can click on a Subject Heading.

However, searching by subject is not always effective because it's difficult to know where or how the terms might appear. We can use these examples to help think of keyword searches, however. A keyword search finds terms wherever they appear, and we can truncate them to improve our results.

Finding E-Books

All books purchased by the Trent Library are listed in TOPCAT, regardless of the format. A thorough TOPCAT search finds all books on a topic, including e-books.

To restrict your search to e-books, use a Power Search in TOPCAT and select "E-Book" as a location. It looks like this: