Eureka!: Resource discovery at the Wellcome Library

Regular visitors to the Wellcome Library website may have noticed the launch of Encore, our new online catalogue interface, during the dark days of February. Summer arrived and brought with it an upgraded version of Encore, which has now been live for more than a week.

What makes Encore such a great discovery tool is the way it exposes all of the material formats, diverse Wellcome Library collections, languages, and subjects relevant to your search. Now that functionality is enhanced with Version 3.0, helping you not only to find resources to support your research, but also to manage that data, explore resources outside the Wellcome Library, and search more effectively. Now you can:

• Easily create lists of catalogued resources and email that list to yourself, colleagues, or friends. Look for the ‘Add to Cart’ link on every catalogue record.
• See from the search results page where to find items in the Library. Gone are the days of making extra clicks to find the crucial shelfmark and location information.
• Explore other library holdings, journal and newspaper databases, and search engines without having to re-enter your search. Click on the ‘Explore’ link from each catalogue record to view the breadth of options.
• Widen your results by wildcard searching. Substituting an asterisk for letters will let you search for variant spellings. For example, a search for anatom* will bring up records with the words anatomy, anatomist, anatomic and anatomical.

Throughout the deployment process, user feedback has been very important to us. Users who submitted feedback via our online or print surveys have been overwhelmingly positive about their experience using Encore, with 77% of respondents reporting that “Encore is very easy to use.” Positive comments include:

“You don’t need to be overly specific – it brings up all the related hits.”

“Great way to find MA dissertations”

“It is a good adjunct to the original cataloguing system. If I am stuck for sources, I try using encore, to see the original search is missing additional material.”

“I think it is an excellent system as it is clear and leads you to look at other fields which perhaps wouldn’t have been so obvious. It has helped me find a wide range of books and articles to look into for the topic I am researching.”

Spend a few minutes with Encore and see if you agree. Then let us know what you discovered via our online survey! Your feedback, both good and bad, will help us guide the ongoing development of this product.