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NBLA Catalog Navigation Guide: Common Issues and Workarounds

A guide to navigating the AIP Niels Bohr Library & Archives online catalog

Overview

NBLA adopted a new online catalog interface platform in March 2025. Since this required a migration of our records to a new system, there are some kinks that we are still working out that may affect your search experience. We ask that you have patience while we work to resolve these issues.

This page documents some known issues that have come up and suggested workarounds. Our Classic Catalog is also still available and can be used to supplement searching.  

If you come across an issue with the catalog not mentioned here or on our Search Tips page, please email us at nbl@aip.org or submit this feedback form.

Serial Holdings

Issue: Lists of Journal Holdings display rather clumped together and may be missing information regarding whether a journal is located on or off site. See the record for the holdings of the Journal Nature and Physics Today as examples. 

Solution: Use the NBL System Identifier listed in the catalog record to search the Classic Catalog for the journal you are interested in. 

Wild Card Searching

Issue: Boolean and wild card characters are not working.

Solution: Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) are not recognized by this catalog, nor are wild card and truncation characters like asterisks (*) and question marks (?). If you need to perform a complex search using one of these options, please use our Classic Catalog

Limited Search Results

Issue: You search a combination of keywords in the "All Fields" box that you think should give results, however you get no results.

Solution: The "All Fields" search assumes that all of the keywords you have listed are part of the same field, and searches each field one by one for these terms, rather than a keyword search of the words individually in any field. Thus if you are looking for an author name and a subject keyword at the same time in All Fields, you will get no results. To search for an author and a subject keyword at the same time, use the Advanced Search. Some Title/Author pairings will work in All Fields since often the primary author is listed in the title field of the record.  

Hyperlink Searches

Series Title searching:

Issue: Clicking on a series title heading in detailed view of a catalog record yields a search with no results and the search term has SERIES_CUSTOM= or SERIES_DETAILS= in the header while searching "Everything" in "All Fields"

Solution: Change the "All fields" drop down to "Keywords in series headings" and run the search again. Note that SERIES_DETAILS often includes the volume number, so that search may just result in one record. 


 

 

Sorting Errors

Issue: Sorting search results by options in the "Sort by" dropdown, especially for Title and Date, don't follow expected alphabetical or chronological order.

Solution: This is a known issue which we are working on resolving. In the meantime, we recommend using other facets or sort features to narrow your results or using the Classic Catalog for additional sort features. 

The default search result order for the online catalog is by "Relevance" which relates to how closely a result is likely to match your query.

  • Date (ascending and descending chronologically by publication date). Migrating the catalog data has resulted in some publication date sorting errors we are working to resolve, so there may be a few items with non-standard dates (e.g. text based or other calendar systems) or date ranges (such as periodicals and journals), that may appear in unusual places within the results. 
  • Title sort titles alphabetically by the first word of the title (A-Z) excluding articles (like A or The). Migrating the catalog data created some errors with this sort which we are working on fixing. If you need a list of results organized alphabetically by title, you can still use the Classic Catalog where alphabetical by title is the default search.
  • Author sort option sorts the results alphabetically (A-Z) by author field (generally the last name of an author). This appears to be working, but please use the catalog feedback form to let us know if it is not.