Folger Tooltips: New Hamnet URL and search limit

We’ve recently made two small but significant improvements to Hamnet, the Folger’s online catalog—not enough to be worth a fanfare of “New and improved!” but probably at least worth pointing at while saying “Still old, but less irksome!”

The first change is so obvious you’ll wonder why it took so long: Hamnet’s hostname now matches its name-name. Go to hamnet.folger.edu and you’ll get (surprise!) Hamnet.

Rest assured, the old URLs with “shakespeare.folger.edu” in them will continue to work. Seventeen years of use is too long a legacy to ignore.

The other change is more cumbersome to explain, but well worth figuring out. Want to limit your search to just vault material in order to exclude paper and electronic facsimiles? Want to limit your search to everything except vault material because you’re at the Folger on a  Saturday, when no new vault material can be brought up? Hamnet’s list of location limits has gone from thirty-eight choices to four:

• Online e-resources
• Open areas
• Staff offices
• Vault

To make use of location limits, click the “Set limits” link at the lower right of the search boxes before entering any search terms (if you enter search terms first, they’ll disappear when you follow the link).

Then, on the “Search Limits” screen, select the location or locations you want. Use Ctrl-click to select multiple locations one-by-one, and Shift-click to select a range of locations. Then click the “Set Limits” button, and you’ll be returned to the search screen.
Here’s what the location names mean, in practice:

Online e-resource: records for things like e-books, digitized microfilm from EEBO, Folger vault books that have been fully or partially digitized, and websites. For electronic resources that are not online (e.g., DVDs, CD-ROMs), use the Item Type limit instead.

Open areas: records for things readers can get to on their own. The vast majority will be in the open stacks, but “open areas” also includes locations like the Reading Rooms (mostly reference books, but dozens of oil paintings as well), and even the outside of the building (yes, the nine marble sculptures by John Gregory have Hamnet records. Here’s the record for King Lear, the only one whose design Mr. Folger lived long enough to see).

Staff offices: records for books that have to be retrieved by a staff member but are treated as “open stacks” once signed out to a reader (you can keep it on your assigned shelf if you have one, take it down to the copiers, and so on).

Vault: records for material stored in the Art Vault, STC Vault, and Deck C Vault—basically, anything that gets signed out on a paper call slip. Remember, these are locations, not item types or date ranges. The STC Vault has more than just books listed in A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640, and not all STCs are in the STC Vault, for instance.

 Do those location names and choices seem like the right ones to you? We wanted to have just four, so that they wouldn’t scroll off the bottom of the “Location” window, and welcome your comments and suggestions.