ScienceBase Catalog is a flexible, powerful tool for finding
and accessing information resources. The system enables
users to directly access information resources by providing
users with links to websites or data sets. This video will
demonstrate the techniques used to browse through
records, navigate through your results, and discover
basic information about them. Begin by opening
ScienceBase Catalog. In ScienceBase Catalog there are two
basic methods for finding resources- searching and browsing.
Searching for records enables you to locate information
resources that are relevant to a particular subject or idea while
browsing allows you to explore all of the records that are
available in ScienceBase Catalog based on certain criteria.
You can start a new search or begin browsing from the
ScienceBase Catalog main page, which is shown here. First,
let’s browse through a few records. Because ScienceBase
Catalog contains millions of items, it’s important to narrow
down our browsing. ScienceBase Catalog has many options
to help you browse more efficiently, which are shown in the
browse toolbar on the left hand side of the screen. To open
the browse toolbar, click the small arrow on the left side of
your screen. We can select the records we want to browse
based on four different criteria. Click each criteria to explore
the options. Types of Records displays the basic item types in
ScienceBase catalog, along with the number of records of each
type. You can click on an item type to see all of the records of
that type. Keywords displays the most common keywords
associated with ScienceBase Catalog records and the number
of items using that keyword. You can click on a keyword to see
all of the records using that keyword or search for a particular
word by typing it in the search box and pressing enter. You can
also browse by Author or Data Owner. In ScienceBase Catalog,
many items have a data owner, an organization that is
responsible for updating and maintaining the data. Often the
originator of that data. Let’s try browsing for some records. If
we are interested in finding a map, it might be helpful to see
what types of maps are available in ScienceBase Catalog. Open
the Types of Records tab and click map. The results are displayed
in the ScienceBase window. We can see a list of maps in the panel
on the left hand side of the screen, and the location of each map is
shown in the world map on the right hand side of the screen.
The results panel only shows ten results at a time. To navigate
through the results, click on the arrows or click on a number to
skip to a page. On the world map, the large red dots with letters
correspond to the results shown in the results panel. The small
red dots correspond to results that are shown on a different
page. For now, let’s return to the ScienceBase Catalog main page.
Click the text in the upper left hand corner that says ScienceBase
Catalog. In this video we learned how to browse through ScienceBase
Catalog records based on several criteria, navigate through the
results of our selection, and view the location of records on the
world map. In the next video, we’ll learn how to search for records
based on keywords and phrases.