The Bowen Library on-line catalogue–the replacement for the card catalogue–has been available to West End members for several years, both in the library and via the Internet. Recently the link from the church website to the catalogue was lost, and it has not yet been replaced. However, you can still search the catalog from home. Use http://westendumc.info/cgi-bin/libsearch.cgi?dbNum=1&action=3 as your URL to reach the search screen.

A few things to remember about searching the Bowen catalogue.

• The Subject field is not a keyword search field. If a catalogue entry includes Subject entries, they will be searched for the term in the Subject search field.
• If you aren’t sure about the exact title of a book or the full name of the author, provide what you are sure of. You’ll get more responses that way, even though many of them may be irrelevant.
• If you search for “Lent” as a Title, you’ll get titles that include “lent”, “lenten”, and “violent”, among others. However, if you search for “lenten”, titles with the word “lent” will not be listed.
• When searching by Author, enter the name in last-name, first-name order.
• A call number that begins with a “D” indicates a title that has been discarded and is no longer in the Library.
• A call number that begins with “**” indicates a volume that is checked out.
• A call number than begins with “J” is in the Children’s collection. “F” indicates fiction and “Y” material suitable for youth. “V” and “A” are designations for videos and audiotapes. Any material designated “R” or “Ref” is for room-only reference use.
• Some specialized collections have been designated by category. These include Stephen Ministry, Liturgy Resources, Parenting, and Strengths Coaching. These specialized collections can be searched using the Category field.

The Bowen Library on-line catalogue search engine is not robust–it will never give Google any competition! But if you are patient, and willing to do multiple searches, you’ll find it definitely beats trying to find a particular volume by searching the shelves!