New Leiden catalogue : Primo

From November on, the Leiden University Libraries started using a new catalogue, a so called ‘discovery service’ called Primo. Primo, also referred to as the ‘new catalogue‘ (just ‘catalogue’ from 2012), lets you discover books and articles in an easier way. It will pull up all kinds of extra results provided by fulltext databases and other eresources available at Leiden University, so there are many fulltext journal articles and otherwise hidden results to be found.
Try it out by yourself through the new link catalogue.leidenuniv.nl.

Once you have your search results, it is really easy to refine through a clever set of choices on the top of the result list and the left hand side. One can restrict by resource type, by language or by fulltext availability.
For example, one can refine by location, so here are the results for ‘Buddhist art China‘ available at the East Asian Library; for all journals available at the EAL on Japanese earthquakes; and the results for fulltext articles available for Leiden University on North Korea famine. Chinese language search is supported, Japanese and Korean not yet.

One word of note about the ‘locations’ tab. When it says Available, see “Locations” for more information, you can click the ‘locations’ link where it says it is “On Shelf” and you have to sign in to request. After doing so, it now says ‘Request not possible’. This is a small glitch, it actually means you have to our East Asian Library service desk to fill in a slip of paper to request your book and pick it up.
The location might also say Check holdings, see “Locations” for more information. Then it says, very vaguely, ‘May be available’. This means also you have to come to the library to ask at the service desk, where you can pick it up.