Discover Hidden Magazines with Encore

Have you ever wanted to find magazines on a particular topic like fashion, home improvement, photography, or travel, but didn't have a clue on any of their titles? Maybe you just wanted to browse through a list of magazines on a specific topic, but wasn’t quite sure how to do this.

Enter Encore—San Francisco Public Library’s new catalog discovery tool—to help you with such a question. You will find a search box on the home page that looks something like this:

Enter a search term like cars into the green box where it says “Explore the Catalog.” Although you will initially receive over 1000 hits, notice the “Refine by” side bar:

Under the subheading “Format,” click on to see more formats. Click “Magazine-Live,” and you'll pull up a list of current magazine titles related to cars.

Steer over to the right side of the screen, and you’ll see a box labeled “Refine by Tag”:

Here you can sharpen your search by exploring different tags. Click on [Show more tags] and you'll see a tag cloud of related terms that can enhance your search. For instance, here are some additional tags you might consider using--"antique and classic cars," "sports cars," "used cars," and so forth.

And there you have it. Give Encore a spin and uncover hidden magazines you may not even have known existed in our collection.