Bowdoin Debuts a Unified Search Tool for Libraries, Arctic Museum, and Art Museum

And a student trying to find books or articles about Picasso for an art history paper might be delighted to find that "the Museum of Art has sixteen Picassos," Unsinn said, which they can then make an appointment to see in person.

In the process of getting Compass to work well, Unsinn, too, made her own serendipitous stumbles. "It was a fun project to work on because it opened my eyes to a lot of neat things that the museums have," she said.

One of her favorite findings was a unique collection of cards circa 1900-1910 for Arctic adventurers. "The one that really cracked me up was a set of collectible cigarette cards for polar explorers. I just found that in the process of troubleshooting."

Anne Collins Goodyear, codirector of the Museum of Art, said the new integrated search tool opens up an exciting new era, "one in which information about the College's broad range of cultural resources-from works of scholarship and literature to works of art-can be made even more easily accessible to a broad community of researchers on campus and beyond.

It helps bring together bodies of knowledge and forms of expression from many different disciplines and historical eras and will undoubtedly help to provide the foundation for many new forms of inquiry and collaboration."