This is the user’s manual for THL members authorized to create, edit, and manage THL bibliographic records using Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT), which has documentation under “help” after you have logged into the program itself (THL SPT Help). There is also an excellent overview of SPT at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november02/almasy/11almasy.html.
The bulk of the THL manual of instructions for actual data entry can be found under Data Entry. For new editors, please carefully read the following documents in sequence one by one.
Create an account: go to SPT Home and create an account by clicking on the “sign up for an account” link at the bottom of the login box on the lower right-hand side of the screen. For your user ID, use the first initial of your first name and your last name, with no space in between and no caps. This makes the creator and reviser of a record immediately identifiable, since the user ID of the creator and the reviser is displayed in the record. Example of a user ID for Joe Schmoe: jschmoe.
In the optional “User Information” section, please fill in your full name. Any other data you choose to enter in this section is entirely at your discretion.
You will receive an automatically-generated password. Use it to log in. Then, in the “Navigate” box on the right, click on “Preferences” and change your password to a password of your choice.
Send an email to us at thdlreference@virginia.edu notifying us that you have created a user account (include in the email the user ID you created). We will then assign editor privileges to your account.
Log in to the SPT database. To begin editing, in the “Navigate” box on the right click on “Metadata Tool.” This will go to a window that still has the “Navigate” box on the right but also has below it a “Metadata Tool” box. To create a new record, click on “Add New Resource” in the Metadata Tool box. This will open a new window with the title “Add New Resource” at the top. You’re now ready to create your bibliographic record!
Follow the instructions detailed below for each field.
For more extensive instructions and tips, log in to SPT, click on “Metadata Tool” in the “Navigate” box, then click on “Metadata Tool Help,” and finally click on “Adding Resource Records” in the table of contents at the top of the page.
Note: the unique ID for each record is found at the very end of the URL. It is the number that follows “ResourceId=.”
To edit a record that has already been created, log in, click on “Metadata Tool,” and then in the “Metadata Tool” box click on “Edit Resources.” Search for the record you want to edit by its title or any other field in the dropdown menu. You may also select various limiters for your search. For more extensive search instructions and tips, log in to SPT, click on “Metadata Tool” in the “Navigate” box, click on “Metadata Tool Help,” and finally click on “Editing Resource Records” in the table of contents at the top of the page.
There are a number of fields you can search. You can also search for all records created by a particular SPT editor. Scroll down to the “Added By” dropdown menu and select the name of the editor whose records you want to find. This searches the “created by” field. You can also search the “last modified by” field via the “Last Modified By” dropdown menu just to the right of the “Added By” menu. For these searches, after you have selected an option from the dropdown menu, you must click on the “Start Search” button in the “Customize your results display” box that is directly below the “Added By” and “Last Modified By” menus.
The search function for controlled names in the “Edit Resources” search page has a major shortcoming: it does NOT search data entered in the “Variant Name” field attached to a controlled name.
The unique ID for each record is found at the very end of the URL. It is the number that follows “ResourceId=.”
For general detailed instructions on how to fill out a catalog record, see Data Entry. In addition, we are documenting more specific instructions for specific types of resources and/or projects: