Using our online catalogue

In these difficult and very strange times, the Library of Birmingham is currently closed to visitors, however our Archives & Collections team are still working hard behind the scenes at home to improve online access to our catalogues and resources.

Here at the Iron Room, we will continue to bring you (hopefully!) interesting and useful blogs. You may see some disruption to our schedule over the coming weeks – we hope to bring you a blog a week, but this may not always be possible as we adapt to our new ways of working.

What still remains important to us is you, our researchers, and we hope you will continue to enjoy reading our articles and stay safe.

So what to do for our first blog working remotely? A guide to using our online catalogue! We have a lot of researchers contacting us who have struggled to use our online catalogue to identify what they need. If you’re not familiar with it, it can be tricky so this step by step guide will help you get the most from it.

When you visit http://calmview.birmingham.gov.uk you will see the following homepage:

Figure 1: Online catalogue homepage with search box highlighted

The search box I’ve highlighted above is for an any text search. I searched for steam engines and it returned the following:

Figure 2: Search results – click on the image to take you to the real Collection Level page

As you can see there are 647 results for the search! By clicking on the column titles, you can order the results by title, date and so on. You can also click on the Refine Search button to add additional information. To get into the full Collection Level entry, click on the reference number as highlighted above.

You can also do an Advanced Search by clicking on the tab from the homepage:

Figure 3: Advanced Search tab

This will bring up more options to search. I’ve searched specifically for the James Watt Papers by putting MS 3219 in the Ref No box:

Figure 4: Advanced Search for MS 3219

This will search for a specific collection and should only produce one hit on the search. Whether you search for a specific collection or do an any text search, the search results page will look the same. Click on the Ref No (as shown in Figure 2 above) and this will take you to the Collection Level entry. Here you will find background information about the collection. You can see what level you are in on every catalogue entry by the Level field.

Figure 5: MS 3219 Collection Level entry – click on the image above to take you to the real Collection Level entry

Click on the Reference Number as highlighted above and this will take you to what we call the tree:

Figure 6: MS 3219 Tree view

Note the (+) sign highlighted above. This means there are further records in that series. Click on the (+) until you see a (-) sign as follows:

Figure 7: MS 3219 Extended tree view

Once you reach the point where there are no (+) or (-) signs, click on the title:

Figure 8: Title highlighted

This will take you to the record you need when ordering documents:

Figure 9: MS 3219 Item Level entry

Note in the above that it is an Item Level entry and has both a Ref No and a FindingNumber. To order documents, please use the FindingNumber when contacting us. You can also see the bottom field says AcccessStatus. If this says anything other than open, you might not be able to view the item. If that field says Closed (condition), Closed (content) or Closed until assessed, please contact us to find out more.

Top Tips:

Check the tree!
Some entries only have a Collection Level entry, some will only have a Series Level but most will have an Item Level. You can only find this by checking the tree and if there is a (+) sign. Retrieving a whole collection is rarely possible so we do need the Item level reference where available. If you do want to see a whole series of documents, please let us know when making an appointment.

Click on the RefNo!
To get back to the tree structure from a catalogue entry, click on the RefNo as highlighted in Figure 5.

Check for the FindingNumber!
This is the number we need when retrieving documents for you.

Searching within a collection? 
From the advanced search box (see Figure 4) put the reference number in the Ref No box followed by an asterisk (e.g. MS 3219*). Then put in your search term in the Any Text box (e.g. Steam) and it will search for occurrences of that word within that collection.

Is it a local studies item?
As a general guide, any references beginning L, LF, LP, AX and so on are local studies and we also need the title when ordering.

If you found this useful, you can download this user guide here  or you can watch our video on YouTube. 

Of course you are welcome to contact us directly if you’ve been through the above and still can’t find what you are looking for. Happy searching!

Nicola Crews
Archivist