The Virtual Library software greatly reduces KSI's library staffing needs by facilitating independent student searches and by making inventory control much easier. When you want to check out a book from the library you will need to present the following information to the office staff:

     1.   Book Title

     2.   BookID

     3.   Location number of the book

     4.   Valid Student, Faculty or Staff ID Card

A staff member will use this information to retrieve a book for you. Books can be checked out for 14 days at a time. You can borrow a maximum of 3 books at a time.

The following is a sample of the necessary information that should be presented to an staff member in the Administration Office:

     1.   Book Title: Public Works

     2.   BookID: 3-1234-000000030

     3.   BuildingID: KSI Main Complex

     4.   Room: 206

     6.   Shelf: 00105025

To access the Virtual Library from any computer on KSI's network, turn on the computer, run Windows and select the KSI LIB group. Choose BOOKMAN and run it. When you start BOOKMAN you will see this screen. You will then select a search method: BookID, ISBN, Title, Author or Subject/Keyword. Each of these will be covered in turn.

This is the screen that will appear when you start the library program. Three functions will be added to the future version of Virtual Library: People_with_same_Interests, Related_Books, and Similar_Documents. In the future, you can click on People_with_same_Interests to find out those people who have the same interests as yours. Clicking on Related_Books will generate a list of books related to the current book you have found, and clicking on Similar_Documents will display one by one those documents similar to the current document you have found. You can also turn on Alert_Message so that you will receive alert messages when related books, similar documents, or people with same interests are found. These functions rely on the active index to collect information.

When you select BookID you will get this screen. Enter the BookID at the prompt and click on the "ok" or click on cancel instead to get back to the main menu.

This is the screen you will get when you select ISBN from the main menu. The procedure is the same as for BookID above.

When you select Title for your search you will get this screen.

You can opt to include only part of the title as is shown. This is a very powerful feature since you may not know the complete title, or, there might be some variation in terminology. For example, by typing "*fuzzy*" at the prompt, we get numerous search results, including titles on "fuzzy logic," "fuzzy sets," or even "fuzzy objective function algorithms" as our search results screen below indicates.

Be careful what words you search for. Using words like "the" is not productive since it would list almost every book in our library. If we had used "fuzzy logic" above, however, we would have limited the search too much as shown.

To get more information we select one of the books listed in the search results. We can either select the book and then click on the "ok," or, we double click on the title itself. This brings up a detailed record of the selected work which displays all the data about it.

At this point there are several options. You could return to the main menu. Clicking on "VL-Search" instead brings up a map of the library, indicating what room the book is in.

The actual bookcase that it is on is indicated in green as shown.

Clicking on any of the bookcases shown will present a view of its shelves. When the indicated bookcase (#10) is selected we see the books there. The title in green is the book that was searched for. Titles in blue indicate books that are currently in the library. Titles in grey indicate books that are checked out. Selecting any title changes its color to red and displays the complete title along with other pertinent information at the bottom of the screen.

You may choose to search for a book by author ...

...or by topic/keyword.

As these screens show, the procedure is fairly similar. Search results will be shown in the Search Results Screen as before. Using these search techniques in combination is a very easy and powerful way to find what you are looking for once you become familiar with the software.

Soon, users will also be able to directly access ILLINET (the Illinois network of librarys) online from a terminal at KSI to search for additional materials. Checkout procedures are similar to the ones listed above. You can search ILLINET for books that the KSI library does not posses. You then need to make a printout of the Title, ISBN and author, and present this information with a valid KSI ID to the office staff. The requested work will arrive in a few days.