Legal Research

Books Unbound Search Improved

The latest edition of InsideTrack from the Wisconsin State Bar highlights some major improvements in the search capability of Books Unbound. Books UnBound is the subscription-based online library of State Bar of Wisconsin CLE Books.

The first improvement is that you can now search across the all of the Books UnBound titles in your subscription. Previously, you could only search within one title at a time. To search across all titles, first open one of the titles in your collection. At the top, there is a search box in which you'll enter your terms. Search within "this book" is the default, but you can change it by selecting "all books" from the drop down menu.

It would be nice if there were a search box right on the main page without linking into a specific title, but at least it's possible to do the search across titles somewhere now.

The second improvement is that your search terms are highlights in your returned documents (see screen shot below). Previously, the terms would be highlighted in the list of results, but when you clicked in to the document, you didn't know where your terms appeared.

Unfortunately, there still appears to be no way to jump to the next search result without scrolling down the page or going back to the search results page by clicking the back arrow or re-doing the search. This would a nice improvement

Are there other changes that I missed? If so, please comment or email me.

The new search interface is powered by Google. I'm very pleased with the enhancements, although there is a little more room for improvement. Read more about the changes in the full InsideTrack article.
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Update: There is a third improvement that I forgot to mention in my original post. Since the search is supported by Google, there are some advanced search options available, such as phrase searching, boolean logic, number range, in title, etc. Carol Hassler, from the Wisconsin State Law Library, offers some tips in the latest edition of the LLAW Newsletter.

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on October 06, 2010 (boomark / email).