By now, most of you have discovered that links to Pathfinder and GLADIS are nowhere to be found on the Library’s web site. In their place you will notice the bizarre neologism OskiCat – (Berkeley mascot) + cat(alog). What this means is that the massive migration of millions of records from the former online catalogs to a new and improved integrated library system is now complete. From this point forward, OskiCat is what you will need to use for most of your UC Berkeley library needs.
A few of the improvements that OskiCat brings are highlighted on the Library’s web site along with a growing list of FAQs and a quick tour of the new catalog:
• You can track items you have requested from storage.
• You can quickly check what items you have checked out.
• It’s easier to renew items online.
• You can find course reserves quickly and easily.
• You can limit your search results to your preferred libraries.
• It reminds you ahead of time when your items are due.
• It includes more campus libraries.
• You can limit your search results to online items.
• You can request materials check out to another borrower.
Relevant to research in the Romance languages, you will notice that OskiCat fully supports Unicode so that you can now search and retrieve results with diacritics. Neither GLADIS nor Pathfinder ever supported this global standard.
OskiCat also displays permalinks (permanent URLs) in each record so that you can link to the most recently updated record from your bibliographies, blogs, course guides, and web sites like bSpace.
At present, OskiCat does not allow those eligible for the RLCP to make direct borrowing requests from Stanford and UT Austin. However, you can continue to use the borrowing request form to initiate such requests.
While the first step in records migration was completed on June 24, it is important to keep in mind that much records clean-up work and refinement of the public interface remains to be done. With your constructive criticism, it is our hope that OskiCat will continue to evolve into a more perfect catalog. You may submit comments on the OskiCat’s questions & comments form designed for that very purpose.