Boosting student engagement with exciting search features in Oliver v5

Oliver v5 customers have two exciting search features at their disposal that will help engage students in their exploration of the school library’s resources.

Tiled Search results and the Orbit Super Search (Federated Search for Oliver v5’s junior interface users) present a visually engaging interface for students and staff.  

Tiled Search Results

The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text.

This is probably not surprising to school librarians who are accustomed to using bright, image rich displays to encourage students to explore new books and genres.

The great news is that these “visual merchandising” tactics are now even more available through Oliver v5 with the new tiled Search results.

The tiled search results may look simple, but the layout actually contains a wealth of visual and written content that will help engage students in their evaluation of the resources.

Every school librarian knows that students do judge a book by its cover! The bright colours of the cover art in the tiled search results give a fresh, engaging feel and, without a doubt, it will encourage students to browse the catalogue and consider books they wouldn’t have previously.

In addition to providing students with all the information they need to locate the resource, the tiles also include

• A series of big, bright green and yellow ticks and red crosses across the cover art to help students to quickly evaluate the availability of the resources.
• Icons in the upper right of the tile to let students know what type of resource it is, and if it is part of a special reading list that has been curated.
• Star ratings from book reviews to encourage students to explore resources that their peers have enjoyed.

The traditional List View is still available, ensuring optimum flexibility for the unique and varying needs of school libraries globally. Oliver v5 school libraries have the choice of which layout they would like to set as the default for all users (this can be changed by the school themselves in the administration section of Oliver v5).

Importantly, users can independently set their own default view that will be shown when they are logged in to Oliver v5 and they can switch between the two at any time using the List and Tile icons shown alongside the toolbar icons.

Orbit Super Search (Federated Search)

Oliver v5’s junior interface Orbit, offers powerful search capabilities.

Super Search makes it easy for younger students take advantage of the full power of Oliver v5’s Federated Search.

For school libraries that have Federated Search enabled, the Orbit interface will offer a Super Search button alongside the existing search buttons.

A Super Search lets students search your school library catalogue as well as other data sources such as YouTube, Google, ClickView, Britannica Online, World Book Online and other databases that you subscribe to (there are over supported 1600 Search Sources to choose from)*.

All the data sources are searched at the same time and the results are shown on a single screen.

Super Search helps guide younger students to a richer range of research materials, helping them to achieve greater academic outcomes. *Super Search is only available to schools with Oliver v5 Federated Search.

Further Reading

• To find out more about federated search, download our brochure
• To learn more about the Orbit interface, read this blog
• Click here to watch a short (2:46min) demonstration of Oliver v5

Editor’s note: This post was originally published November 2016 and has been updated for freshness, relevance, and accuracy in November 2021.