CNAQ Library Blog

I'm looking for some more help with mobile devices and the library. I know a lot of students and staff have a lot of different phones. To help us know where we are at, I'm going to start doing some short surveys to help me determine where I need to focus my time in creating a mobile interface.

Survey

In other news, the second part of the Library Press Display video is now done. You can see it below.

We're still waiting on news on Aquabrowser and EZproxy, so I've been working on some more side projects.

Part II of the Library Press Display video will be live by tomorrow, you can find here.

I've added a new section to the wiki on Mobile Device Support. This includes e-readers, ipods, smartphones and the host of other devices that were just announced at CES in Las Vegas. That page will be updated as I get more information on how our online databases support mobile users.

Over the December holiday, Serials Solutions pushed out a major update for their administration console, which gives me a lot more flexibility in customizing our federated search tool 360 Search, and our OpenURL resolver 360 Link. I've been waiting for this update in order to set a lot of things straight in the interfaces.

The goal is to have matching lists of databases in our Catalog, 360 Search and 360 Link. This list would break the databases up into Reference, General and subject specific databases. I'm still working with ProQuest, the parent company of Serials Solutions, to figure out some last details of our subscriptions. In the next few days you may see some major and minor changes to the 360 Search interface.

Once this is complete, I'll do a walkthrough to explain the new features.

Thanks for working with me on this!

While we are waiting for vendors to complete our Aquabrowser and finish off 360 Search, I've been working on a Library Video series for our databases. Take a look at our first Library Press Display video. Let us know what you think in the comments!

This is a simple trick that can make reading long articles on the web a lot easier. The Readability Bookmarklet is a little application you can drag to your bookmarks. Whenever you're reading a long website or a website with confusing or flashing graphics, this application will remove all of the advertisements, background and formatting while presenting the photographs, pictures and text in a easy-to read layout.

You can set your preferred settings on the linked website, then drag the bookmark to your Bookmarks folder or your Bookmarks bar. This should work across any browser. I find this software to work best when I click on the 'Print' or 'Single Page” version of an article, then use the Readability bookmark to format the one-page article.

There are some limitations to this software. It won't work on PDF documents. It won't work on Flash.

Readability