Last updated: August 16, 2023

There are two ways to find a book within the NNELS catalogue. You can search for a specific item or you can browse the collection, both methods are describe below.

Search

To search for a book, navigate to the “Search the catalogue” edit field, enter your search term, and select or click on the “search” button.

Some search tips:

• Putting your search term in quotes (“”) will limit the search to that exact phrase.
• To search by author or narrator, type the last name or full name in the search field.
• To search by title, type the entire or partial title into the search field.
• To search by genre, type the genre into the search field.
• To broaden your search, type one or more keywords into the search field.

When the page loads, you will be presented with a list of search results. They can be found at the start of the main content section, right below the level 1 “Search Results” heading. All search results are denoted with level 3 headings displaying the name of the item, allowing you to move efficiently through the results if you are a screen reader user.

For each search result, you will see an “Add to bookshelf” link, author(s), the edition, a short summary snippet, associated genres, one or several download links, and if it is an audiobook, the running time and narrator(s). Clicking on a genre allows you to browse by that specific category and clicking on the name of a narrator will display titles in the collection read by them. If you see “Hardcopy Braille format available.”, this indicates that the item is part of our distributed braille collection. To learn more about a title, click on a title to see more details.

Past the search results, at the bottom of the screen, are pagination links, a list of numbers that will take you to additional pages of results. For screen readers, these links are under the “pages” heading. Note that pagination is unavailable for searches that return less than 16 results.

To filter your search results, navigate to the level 2 heading called “Filters.” This section is located prior to the search results and is on the left side of the screen. Use the checkboxes to filter by format, author, narrator, language, and availability. When you check one or more boxes, the list of books will update automatically on the same page.

To remove the filters, use the “Reset all filters” link that is under the level 2 “Filters” heading.

Browsing the Collection

To browse the collection, begin by going to the NNELS homepage. Navigate to the main content area and look for the level 2 heading “Browse the Catalogue.” Underneath the heading, you will find several links. Use the “New Books” link to see recently added titles. Click on the “Browse by Collection” link to see our entire collection organized alphabetically. Past these links are direct links to Canada Literary award collections and open access titles.

Clicking on “New Books” or on one of the collections will load a page showing a list of titles for the chosen collection in the main content section. Like the search results page, each title is a link to view more details. Underneath the title link, you will find the author, summary, a list of available formats (many with download links), and if it is an audiobook, the running time and narrator.