How to search the catalogue

You have several options through which you can enter the database. Click the downward arrow in searching box. You will get the options, e.g. Author, Title, Subject so on. Select your required one and press the enter key or click “Go”.

Then in the box type the name of subject you want to search.

You will find the catalogue of all the books on geography. Now if you want to know the books on Geography by any particular author then go to advanced search. There you will get options to relate different keywords e.g. Author and subject, Title and subject so on.

How to search the OPAC in Bengali or Hindi

Since the library has items items cataloged in Bengali as well, it is imperative to provide the users with a means to search the OPAC using languages other than English. This is achieved by the use of the Google Indic Transliteration facility. The best thing about this facility is that to use this, you do not need any separate software or setup any complicated software. Being entirely browser based. as long as you are using a modern browser on any system that has support for Indian languages in Unicode, this feature works simply out-of-the-box. In the next few steps we are going to show how it works.

While Google Indic Transliteration supports other Indian languages, in this OPAC the choice of languages is currently restricted to Bengali and Hindi (Devnagari) (see the green arrow in the picture above). You can select the language you want by selecting it from this drop-down list.

The toggling between normal English typing and transliterated phonetic English typing is done by clicking on the small button widget pointed to by the small green arrow above. When the button does not appear to be depressed, the search box will use normal English language typing and vice versa.

With the language set to Bengali and the transliteration mode turned on, you can now type phonetically in English.

Hint: A word will not be transliterated until you press the spacebar on your keyboard, as the space tells Google that you have finished typing out a word and that it should now attempt to transliterate it, in this case into Bengali text.

As described above the text is now converted into an unicode Bengali word, which can now be searched on the OPAC by pressing the <ENTER> key or by clicking on the "Go" submit button. In case you want to add more words to your search query you can additionally do that by as explained above.