Library

Introducing PiCarta

Combined access to NCC and OLC

PiCarta is a service of OCLC. You can search, find and request high quality information in a number of integrated databases containing bibliographic records, table of contents data and hyperlinks to full text and web pages. PiCarta allows combined access to NCC and OLC.

The Dutch Central Catalogue NCC contains bibliographic references and the locations of approximately 14 million books and almost 500,000 periodicals in more than 400 libraries in The Netherlands. The database is updated directly and continuously. The NCC database is connected to the Interlibrary Loan System IBL. This makes it possible for the ITC Library to send requests for photocopies of articles or requests for books automatically to these libraries that can supply the requested documents.

Online Contents OLC contains references to all articles that appear in almost 15,000 current periodicals in all fields of science. This database contains beside scientific also general, non specialist and popular periodicals. The database was started in September 1992 and is updated daily. The annual increase amounts to more than 2 million references. Basis for Online Contents are the tables of contents of the separate issues. The Online Contents database is connected to the Interlibrary Loan System IBL, so that the ITC Library can enter requests for PDFs or photocopies of articles from Dutch libraries.

Searching literature

When you click the Go button or another link to PiCarta, you will find the following search screen.

Search terms

To search bibliographical data, you must enter a search operation in the horizontal search field, next to the search button.

• A search operation consists of a search term or a combination of search terms. A search term is a sequence of characters without spaces.
  For example: The search engine regards bookplates as one search term, while book plates is regarded as two search terms.
  Exception: the author's complete name is regarded as one search term. For example: bakker, bas de.
• In a search term, you cannot use the characters & | ~ () / unless they are preceded by a backslash \. For example: ups \& downs.
• If you want to search for a specific phrase, you must use quotation marks, for example "remote sensing".
• The search engine is not case sensitive. Your can use either upper or lower case letters or you can mix capital and small letters. This has no influence on the results of your search operation.

Once you have entered a search operation, click on the search button. To interrupt a search operation, use your web browser's standard button.

Using multiple search terms, sorting search results, etc.

Above the search field you will see a number of drop-down menus in the search bar with which you can modify a search operation. The options in the menus allow you to further refine your search in the database.

Menu 1

In the first menu you can select one of three search methods:

• Search (or);
  The standard selection is the search method OR. A search operation with two or more search terms shows all titles that contain at least one of the search terms. For example: einstein OR gravity searches for all titles that contain either einstein or gravity or both.
• Search (and);
  In the menu you can also select the AND search method. A search operation of two or more search terms shows the titles that contain all the search terms entered. For example: einstein AND gravity searches for all titles that contain both einstein and gravity.
• Browse;
  With the selection Browse you can scan the index for the search terms you have entered.

After a search it is possible to enlarge, restrict, etc. the results.

Menu 2

In the second menu you can select a search key with which you can further modify a search operation.

Menu 3

With the third menu you can sort the results of your search operation. You can sort by:

• Relevance;
• Year of publication;

By default titles are sorted by relevance. This means they are displayed in sequence of importance. Titles that are most to the point are displayed first. What determines that one title is more relevant than another title? The search engine analyses the contents of the title using a combination of the following factors:

• Frequency: the number of times a search term appears in a title.
• Compactness: the relative length of the titles found.
• Reverse work frequency: terms that seldom appear in the entire database weigh more heavily.

You can also sort publications by year of publication (JVU). The most recent publications are then displayed first.

Click here for more information on Picarta:
http://ppwww.pica.nl/psi_help/?DB=2.41&LNG=EN&COOKIE=U44573