Whatever you do don’t use Google!reference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 11/9/2006 with 11 comments

After we teach our students how to distinguish between authoritative and unauthoritative resources, we need to actually show them how to find such authoritative resources. While our databases are great, they sometimes aren’t the most user-friendly things to search (LexisNexis anyone?). And frankly, these students won’t have access to the databases once they graduate and …

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Why Google (or Ask or Yahoo!) is good for reference workreference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 3/29/2006 with 15 comments

Google/Ask/Yahoo! is rarely the first place I will look for information when helping a student. If it’s a really current topic, I’ll try Academic Search Premiere and LexisNexis. If it’s something more scholarly and related to a specific subject, I will use subject databases, though I will usually try Academic Search Premiere as well since …

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CIL06 Day 3: The Future of Catalogssearch, tech trends

by Meredith Farkas on 3/25/2006 with Comments Off on CIL06 Day 3: The Future of Catalogs

This session was PACKED! I came in with Dave King and we both had to sit on the floor. There aren’t too many folks I’d sit on the floor for, but Roy Tennant and Andrew Pace are definitely two of them. Roy and Andrew both took the word OPAC out of their presentaton, because it’s …

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The Failure of Middleware, Part 7: OAI and Google Scholarlibraries, our digital future, search

by Meredith Farkas on 4/7/2005 with 2 comments

The Open Archives Initiative develops interoperability standards with the goal of developing easy ways to access digital content and improve scholarly communication. They have developed a protocol for harvesting XML-formatted metadata from text repositories. If all e-content providers used open metadata standards, libraries could harvest metadata from a variety of places so that it could …

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The Failure of Middleware, Part 5: The Unintegrated Library System & Federated Searchlibraries, our digital future, search

by Meredith Farkas on 4/7/2005 with 1 comment

Sorry for the delay in posting the rest of this, but we were flying to Florida yesterday to visit family. Nice to be in consistently warm weather for a few days. 🙂 When library catalogs were first developed, all of the electronic needs of a library system were fulfilled by the ILS. At the time, …

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Federated searching and why users aren’t finding/using your electronic materialslibraries, search

by Meredith Farkas on 3/16/2005 with 2 comments

Looking at my alma mater’s library website, I noticed that they are implementing a new federated search tool that searches eight resources (a mix of A&I databases and full-text). It’s powered by Metalib from Ex Libris, a company I think is pretty great. I was really excited at first, until I decided to test it …

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Google Maps: Oh the possibilities!!!reference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 2/28/2005 with Comments Off on Google Maps: Oh the possibilities!!!

When I wrote my first post on how excited I was about Google Maps, I had no earthly idea what the broad capabilities of the application were. I don’t think Jon Udell even did at first, but he quickly discovered some really amazing stuff and illuminates these possibilities for us with fantastic screencasts (using my …

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Google Movies!reference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 2/24/2005 with Comments Off on Google Movies!

Yes, another new Google search tool (it seems like there’s been a new one every day over the past few months!). Google Blog reports that Google has come out with Google Movie “just in time for the Oscars.” It’s not a whole new search engine, but an operator that you can use to search for …

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The cool yellow pagesreference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 2/2/2005 with Comments Off on The cool yellow pages

If you haven’t already, go check out A9.com, a yellow pages for the future. More a reference work than simply a “phone book”, A9 allows users to not only search the yellow pages but it lets you leave notes on the places they find, it shows you what else is in the neighborhood, and sometimes …

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Giving the patron what s/he wantslibraries, reference, search

by Meredith Farkas on 1/31/2005 with Comments Off on Giving the patron what s/he wants

Steph at TechnoBiblio wrote about an interesting observation at a recent panel discussion she attended: The final panelist came forth with a statement that seemed to take the audience by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have… “Users don’t care.” They don’t care that the subject specific databases will bring back more relevant hits. They don’t …

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