Enhancements to Lexis Nexis Academic

Lexis Nexis Academic will be releasing enhancements on August 15, 2009. The enhancements primarily impact the Easy Search form and navigation menus and (as they always say) are designed to make the database less confusing. There is an FAQ about the enhancements here. You can test the Alpha release here. I strongly recommend trying it out soon, because it looks like the main search page has changed significantly!

I particularly like the way all of the search forms are available on the homepage. The tabs to get to specific functions were often missed by students, which led me to pull out the separate search forms on our database page. Good to know the folks at LN are listening to their users!

One thing I noticed is that the Navigation menu is lost when you are taken to a specific search form, like Shepards Citations. The current search forms maintain the tabs at the top of the page, which makes it easier to jump from one search form to another.

Better presentations

An ALA preconference focused on using images and visuals to enhance presentations. Instead of slide after slide of text and bulleted lists, visuals are memorable ways to get your message across. The conference materials are accessible here. I've also saved two of their presentations and a list of related resources to the Reference drive under Instructional Materials. Look for these files:

Power of Image - ALA conference presentation
Get the Picture - ALA conference presentation
Resources for effective presentations - ALA conference presentation

Although the Power Points utilize the presenters' philosophy to tell a story using images, not text, you can still gain a lot of valuable information from their slides (and the notes that are visible if you do not view it as a slideshow).

The list of resources includes links for finding free creative commons images. I've also tagged some sites for this purpose which you can access at http://delicious.com/bookchic831/images.

Proquest Unified Content Platform

In 2010, Proquest plans on launching a unified content platform with a single sign-on and improved searching capability. While I'm not sure how this will impact our current Proquest subscriptions, there is more information available in this LJ Academic article. Given the recent enhancements Ebsco and JSTOR have made, it seems like Proquest is a little slow to jump on-board. But hopefully the new platform will update and add more useful features and make it easier for us to move away from "tool" instruction and towards concept instruction.

LC Call Number game

This is fun.

The Library of Congress Call Number Game, by someone at the University of Pittsburgh

Using tags for Reference

Using web-based tags has made organizing websites I like SO much easier! I've been using Delicious, but there are a number of other tagging sites available. Here's a fun video on how tagging - also known as social bookmarking - works:



Nan and I have been discussing creating a Delicious account for Reference, where we can all access a number of bookmarks that might be useful. Currently there are many bookmarks saved in Internet Explorer and Mozilla on the Reference computer, but as the video points out, these bookmarks are only available on THAT computer. Tagging them with a service like Delicious makes them accessible from anywhere. There are further uses for these bookmarks as well, like incorporating links to them in Research Guides or other places on our website.

The main drawback to social bookmarking is that your bookmarks are saved elsewhere, so you are dependent on that service for retrieving them. In January of this year, tagging site Ma.gnolia lost all of its users data. Oops.

Technorati is the other most popular tagging site. According to Wikipedia, Faves "has a wider range of functionality that encourages interaction with 'friends' in rating the content of linked webpages." This might be more group friendly and worth considering for something like Reference tags.

Diigo allows you to also highlight parts of a webpage and attach sticky notes! I'm going to have to try this one out.

Leave comments and let me know if you prefer a particular service or have other thoughts on creating common tags for Reference-related websites. Oh, and the other great thing is we can assign as many tags as we want to a site. So if I would call something "instruction" and Nan would call it "infolit", we give the site both tags and then can both access it intuitively. No more need to be mindreaders!