Bearcat Search: Home

​​​Watch this extended video on how to use Bearcat Search. You are able to jump around to the different elements in the table of contents if you want. This video was produced by ExLibris so it refers to the search system as Primo.

Bearcat Search moves us to the next generation of user interfaces and allows us to customize the system to fit our users' needs. The system will provide a fresh and intuitive web experience, providing consistent discovery across devices and seamless patron services. Your research experience will stay the same no matter which device you chose to use. 

Bearcat Search will bring us a discovery layer. Are you not sure what that is or what it even means? A library discovery layer allows you to search the library's physical and digital collections at the same time. The added bonus is you will also be able to access the PASCAL catalog from this simple search box. 

Bearcat Search has built in linguistic features that will help provide you with better search results. These features rely on stop words, stemming, and synonyms. If your search returns less than 15 results, the system will deploy the "Did you mean?" feature to make sure your spelling is accurate and let you redefine your search.

The Bearcat Search encourages you to explore topics and materials related to your search results by simply browsing through the topic exploration trail that appears with your search results. 

Topic Explorer: When you perform a search in Bearcat Search, the Topic Explorer pane opens on the right panel of the results screen, showing reference content and related topics. The topic explorer has over 50,000 topics associated with keywords found in actual search logs, and it creates a great jumping off point for you to explore a new topic.

Bearcat Search enables serendipitous discovery through data-driven services, including automated article recommendations, citation trails for each article, topic exploration, virtual browse, and more. Check out the short video to learn more about citation trails. 

Virtual Browsing allows you to navigate stacks, as if you are exploring the physical bookshelves themselves, starting with one item of interest and browsing its vicinity. 

Relevancy ranking is the process of sorting the document results so that those documents which are most likely to be relevant to your query are shown at the top. The new library system will use the following criteria for sorting your search results: the degree to which an item matches the query, a value score representing an item’s academic significance, an item’s relevance to the type of search, and the publication date (recentness) of an item.