(JUL. 14)—There’s a new, faster way of searching through the University Library’s collection of materials with “Tuklas,” a web-scale discovery service that can search across the print and electronic resources of an entire library in real time.

“Tuklas” functions much like an online public access catalog or OPAC, where users can search through the various library resources such as books, academic journals, theses and dissertations, archival documents and articles from local newspapers and magazines.

The engine was developed by current UPD University Librarian Chito Angeles and is based on the open-source library search engine VuFind.

According to the University Library, Tuklas is an improvement over the existing system, where users had to go through numerous online databases to access library resources in different formats.

It is currently integrated with UPD’s existing local databases such as the Index to Philippine Periodicals (IPP), Index to Philippine Newspapers (IPN) and iLib, but it can also be configured to fit other compatible databases and open-access repositories.

According the University Library, Tuklas’ ultimate goal is to “enable users to search across millions of print and electronic resources available in the different libraries of the University of the Philippines System.”