What is the eLibrary?
Cumbria County Council's Electronic Library includes many documents about the work of Adult Social Care. While some of these documents are intended for use by the public, many will have been written for employees and colleagues in other agencies. As a result, the language used in some documents may be unfamiliar to you.
How do I use the eLibrary to look for a document?
The menu on the left hand side gives you four ways of searching for a document:
1 Documents by category:
This searches just the Social Care documents in the eLibrary and allows you to specify a:
- Category - this is the topic the document is about, for example, child protection or domiciliary care (note that more general documents about Adult Social Care work will use the 'Social Care' category);
- Type - this is what sort of document it is, for example, a report, a form or strategy.
If you select a category or a type and click on 'list documents' the eLibrary will return a list of all documents that use the values you have selected. If no documents are returned, try another category or type.
2 Quick search:
This searches document titles and their contents for key words you specify. The search returns a list of documents in order of the number of times your key words appear in each document. Using this search, you can look at all documents in the eLibrary (which covers the whole of Cumbria County Council) or narrow your search down to just documents with a particular category (for example Social Care).
3 Advanced search:
This is a more sophisticated search which allows you to narrow down your search by specifying more things about the document you are looking for.
4 Browse eLibrary
This allows you to browse through the eLibrary by selecting a category. If you cannot find the document you are looking for using one category, try using another, for example child care or parenting. Don't forget that general documents about Adult Social Care will use the general 'Social care' category.
Why won't my computer let me see documents in the eLibrary?
If your computer will not let you view documents in the eLibrary, it may be because you do not have the correct software to enable you to see these.
Many documents are stored in the eLibrary in 'portable document format' or pdf. To see documents in this format, you will need the Abobe Acrobat viewer. This is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the internet into your computer. To do this select the 'Document viewers' option and click on the Acrobat download button.
You can also download software to view documents in other formats from this page.