EX LIBRIS: News from the Library

Happy New Year to members of the Bilkent community: we hope you will all have a pleasant and productive 2012! To start the new year, we would like to announce that this week the Library will be launching its new website and upgraded library catalog. The new website will have a more user-friendly and more colorful interface, and will include our online reference chat service, "Ask Online," on the main homepage for faster access. The website will be integrated directly with our improved and upgraded "new generation" library catalog, which contains many additional functions and features. For example, search results can be viewed not only as a standard list but also using thumbnails or as an interactive slideshow, and search terms will be highlighted among the results. In addition, lengthy search results can now be refined according to author, subject, publication date, language and material type. Furthermore, if you do not have time to come to the Library or if the book you want has already been borrowed by another user, the new catalog allows you to consult the "preview" of many of our books via Google Books and to read an electronic version via Project Gutenberg! The catalog, which is now integrated with Facebook, will undergo further refinements in the not-too-distant future, including options to search pdf documents, the full texts of Bilkent theses and digital items, as well as a new database discovery service. We hope these upgrades and improvements will make your research easier and faster, and we welcome all comments and feedback. Finally, the Library would like to wish all students good luck in their final exams starting next week!