USGS Multimedia Gallery: (Video)--Browsing the ScienceBase Catalog

ScienceBase Catalog Training Video #1 – Browsing the Catalog

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.