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Living Library Reference Suite - Minimum Specifications

Please review the following minimum requirements to ensure you get the most out of using Living Library.

Operating System

Browser

Flash Player v7

Windows Media Player v6 (PC only)

Screen resolution

Any screen resolution can be used, but we recommend using at least 800x600 to minimise horizontal scrolling.

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Support and Sales

We hope you'll enjoy using the new Living Library Reference Suite. However, if you have any problems, please ensure you meet the minimum specifications for the site (see above). Then:

If you experience a problem with a broken Weblink, please include both the title and the URL for the Weblink in your response to our Support team. To find its correct title and URL, close the top browser window to reveal a Living Library window, and copy the details from there.

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Searching

Not getting the results you want? Take a look at these tips for searching.

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How to search

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The results lists

These results are listed by resource type or by relevance. You can switch between the two types of lists by using the options near the top of the list:

Option button appearance

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Resource types

There are several different types of resource in the main Living Library search:

Icon Resource Type Description
Encylopedia Encyclopedia Subject-specific and general encyclopedias
Pictures Pictures Clipart, images, illustrations and photographs
Multimedia Multimedia Video, audio, animations and simulations
Word Word Dictionaries, thesaurus and quotations
Web Web Subject-specific links to 1000s of useful websites

Living Library also contains Newspaper resources. These can be accessed by clicking the Newspapers link in the Explore section on the home page.

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Resource ratings

Living Library resources are rated as follows to give you an idea of the difficulty of the resource, or the level of the subject matter.

For articles and pictures, the ratings mean:

Resource Rating 1 This is a picture or photograph. It is easy to understand and is suitable for anyone or any ability.
Resource Rating 2 This is a diagram or the easiest type of article. There is very little complexity or difficult subject matter. It is appropriate for all of Primary.
Resource Rating 3 This is a more difficult article or picture including lots of information. It is the highest level within Primary.
Resource Rating 4 This is an article with difficult and detailed information. It should begin to stretch users with its complexity or subject matter. It is only available within Secondary.
Resource Rating 5 This is revision material or the most challenging of articles. It is only available within Secondary.

For Weblinks, the ratings mean:

Resource Rating 1 Suitable for the youngest ages, or older
Resource Rating 2 Suitable for ages 8-11, or older
Resource Rating 4 Suitable for ages 11-14, or older; only available within Secondary
Resource Rating 5 Suitable for ages 16+; only available within Secondary
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Search options

You can refine the results you get by using the Search Options button at the top of every page.

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Advanced searching

More than one search word

To improve your search, you may search for several words at once (a 'string' of words). Type the words florence nightingale into the Search box and click the Go button to see the results.

You should find that the results of this search contain more articles than single word searches for florence or nightingale, but that they are in a much more helpful order. The resources nearer the beginning of the results will be about Florence Nightingale (with none about cities in Italy or brownish European songbirds!).

The above search finds all the articles that contain both the words florence and nightingale as well as the ones that contain only one or the other of the two words.

Refining your search using + and -

What if you want to limit the number of results you are getting?

One way is to make sure you only get results for all the words you type in the Search box. To do this, put a + (plus sign) immediately in front of the second word (don't leave a space). If you want to find only articles that contain both the words florence and nightingale, type florence +nightingale into the Search box and click the Go button.

This search really narrows down the number of articles. It finds far fewer but they are packed full of information about Florence Nightingale.

Alternatively, perhaps you're interested in the Italian city instead. You would want to search for florence but exclude any articles about Florence Nightingale. This time use a - (minus sign) immediately in front of the second word (don't leave a space), type florence -nightingale into the Search box, and click the Go button.

This time the articles you get back all have the word florence but not the word nightingale. The - is the 'must not have' symbol - it means that when searching for the first word, florence, the articles must not contain the second word, nightingale.

Once you're familiar with both the 'must have' (+) and 'must not have' (-) symbols, you can use them in your search terms with most search engines to improve your searches.

Exact phrases

Another way to narrow down the results is to search only for articles that contain all the words you typed, in exactly the order they were typed.

Putting double quotes around several words means that articles must have all those words in exactly that order. Type the words "florence nightingale" (including the quotes) into the Search box and click the Go button to see the results.

You will see that the results only include articles where the words florence and nightingale appear together in that order.

Expanded (Wildcard *)

You can broaden the range of a search by using a wildcard. A wildcard is a symbol that stands for any character or characters. Living Library uses the asterisk wildcard (*), which means 'any number of characters'.

A wildcard is useful if you aren't sure of the correct spelling of the word you want to find, or if you want to find articles about several words that are all based on the same word stem. For example, to search for articles about Scotland and Scottish things, type scot* into the Search box and click the Go button.

This search finds all the articles that contain words starting with the four letters s, c, o and t.

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Shortcuts

Shortcuts let you select your favourite Living Library resources and save them together in named groups, so that people can find them again easily and without searching. When a class is working on a topic, a group of selected shortcuts can save lots of time. To make shortcuts, you need a Restricted User password. This is your Teacher at Home password, which you can find on your certificate of membership.

To save a group of shortcuts on a topic:

  1. Find a resource you want to bookmark.
  2. Click the Add to Shortcuts button. If prompted, enter the Restricted User password. (Your Teacher at Home password).
  3. If the resource should go in a new folder, type a name for the new shortcut and click Save and OK.
    If the resource should go in an existing folder, select Existing shortcut, select the name from the list, and click Save and OK.
    Note that each shortcut folder can hold up to 50 resource links.

The shortcuts are available to all your Living Library users. To use a shortcut, click the Shortcuts button and select the one you want from the list.

If you want to delete or rename shortcuts, click the Manage Shortcuts button, and if prompted, enter the Restricted User password (your Teacher at Home password); then use the Delete and Rename buttons to make the changes you want.

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Topic-o-lator

The Topic-o-lator is a fun way to find resources. When you do a search it will look at your results and put the most relevant topic across those results in the centre of the Topic-o-lator. Around that central topic will be a number of related topics to give you some alternative suggestions to search on. It works a bit like an interactive mind map or spider diagram. You can click on one of the related topics and that will then move to the centre of the Topic-o-lator. At that point you can then choose to click on the Search for.. button underneath to get a set of resources on that topic or continue to keep on clicking through until you find one that interests you.

Why not give it a try? Type in Dance into the search box and click on Go. You will see that the “Topic-o-lator” has put the word Dance into the centre and added some related topics around the edge. Try clicking on one of the topics and see what happens. When you have found a topic that you want to find out more on just click on the green Search for.. button below.

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Caching

If you are wanting to get your whole class using Living Library you may want to consider caching the relevant pages and resources before the lesson as this could significantly improve the time that it takes to download the information from the web, especially if you want to use videos and animations.

Even with a fast broadband connection, a class of 30 simultaneously trying to download a video from the Internet could dramatically reduce a school's bandwidth and the speed of delivery. If your school has a cache you could avoid these problems by accessing the resource before the lesson. Every time you access the Internet a cache will store the website information locally, and once it is there, the other computers on your network can access it quickly and reliably. This could result in huge bandwidth savings and allow everyone to watch the video trouble free. The same is applicable for images, sound clips and animations.