Using INFOMINE canned search to create custom collections

INFOMINE has tools available for you to create custom collections for posting on your own web site, library page, or educational resource. They can be found on our Customize page.

The most basic use of our tools would involve creating a search to direct anyone to a set of resources in the INFOMINE database, selected by you. It's as simple as entering some values in the form to receive a custom search query that you can provide as a link. Begin at the Canned Search Query Generator.

We'll create a set of links for a research guide on Japan and Japanese popular culture. The default fields selected in the search form are title, author, keyword, and subject. This helps to keep the search narrowed down and to return the most relevant resources. When you enter your search terms, you are given the URL specific to your query and a chance to preview the search results. We've entered Japan into the search box, which gives us this result. It may be too broad for our intended audience and purposes; there are 827 results. So let's try making a search for japan popular culture. With only eleven results, this may be a good choice to put on our research page. But let's tweak our search a little more. We've entered japanese popular culture. There are only 9 results and they seem more relevant to our purposes. By experimenting with your searches you can find the most useful or interesting results.

By using the display themes dropdown box, you can get a titles only list or a simple, unbranded layout. There are several options to explore, such as results per page, an alphabetical list instead of a relevance ranked list, and category selection.

Use our feedback page to comment or inquire about these tools, or to get more information about having a custom theme or style created for your institution. Librarians from other institutions who participate in INFOMINE can create truly customized collections using some of the editable fields within our catalogued resources. We welcome any feedback and/or comments. Also, if you ever come across broken links while searching INFOMINE, there is an option in the lower right corner of the record description to [Comment on this resource]. INFOMINE editors have been entering resources into the database since 1994, and it is inevitable that broken links will sometimes affect your searches. We appreciate our users reporting these to us so we can correct them.