There are two common situations that can cause it:

• The record has recently been changed in a way that causes "immediate indexing" to happen - such as by editing. This feature is actually a separate index, to allow us to find things by keywords in the interim period after adding or changing a record and before one of our twice-a-day indexing reports runs.  If the record had already been indexed and the search term(s) appear before and after the change, your result will have "hits" from both immediate and regular indexes so the record shows up twice.  This phenomenon should go away within a day, since after the indexing report has run the record would no longer be in the immediate index.
• The record contains an item that is "shadowed" at the item level, and another item that's not shadowed.  Shadowed items do not appear to the public, only to staff.  Shadowing can happen because the location of the book is designated shadowed (WITHDRAWN, for example, is a shadow location), or because someone has edited the item record to answer "yes" to the Shadowed:  prompt.  Shadowed items are indexed in a special shadow index (keyword indexes only, not browse).  Staff logins searching preferences are set to search BOTH shadow and regular indexes by default. When you do a search for a record with both a shadowed and unshadowed item, you'll get "hits" from both indexes so the record will show up twice in the list.

If neither of these explanations appears to fit your situation, please send a query to DQM-l.

There are a number of possibilities that could cause this:

a.  Are you doing a browse search?  If so, try searching another way using the keyword indexes (Word or Phrase, Author, Title, Combined Search, etc.).

If the record has recently been added to the database, access points (such as title and author) won't show up in browse indexes until after a reindexing report runs (midday and early evening).  However, right after new records are added they are indexed in the "immediate index" which is searchable with a keyword search.

If the title is shadowed (all items are shadowed or shadow locations, or title is marked shadow=yes by a cataloger), access points aren't indexed in browse indexes, but are findable with keyword searches if your search option is SHADOW=BOTH (the default for staff).

b. Is the title fully cataloged or "In-process"?  If you want to include records that are not yet cataloged in your results, and the title you are looking for contains an "initial artice" (a, an, the, and their equivalents in languages other than English), a browse title search may miss the record.  This is because records input for orders or imported "raw" from a bibliographic utility may not have been coded properly to skip the initial article.

Again, you can avoid this possibility by doing some type of keyword search instead of a browse.  The keyword searches ignore most articles as stopwords.

Place items to be withdrawn on the shelf marked "WITHDRAWN" on the metal shelving behind Laura A.'s workstation.

If you have the item(s) in hand, you can place the materials on the DQM ON-THE-FLY AND OTHER CATALOGING PROBLEMS shelf on the metal shelving behind Laura A.'s workstation. If you don't have the volumes but can identify the problem, please send a report to DQM-l.