Monday, March 31, 2008

Thing Seventeen -- The Mighty ELM

I have mixed feelings about the productivity tools show-cased here. For some of the productivity tools, I already use similar products to do similar things, so I couldn't get very enthusiastic about the ones available via ELM. That being said, I can see the usefulness of some of the tools. The "create a web" function allows librarians to create subject web-pages or tutorials or similar finding aids when they do not have access to like functions within their library. The same could be said of RSS feeds from subject searches. I myself use the "auto-alerts" function of many databases -- the precursor to RSS feeds. For those, it all depends on how you want to receive your information -- via email or through an RSS feed. I had the same problem as many of the other 23thinger's -- couldn't get the Gale/Cengage Learning RSS feed to play nicely with the Google Reader.

I was able to create a web-page in Academic Search Premier, added all of those nice features and have emailed it myself -- for some reason, when I went through the download function, I never got any of the instructions, so I rather doubt if it ever did.

I can see where adding notes, etc. to such items as ebooks can be useful, though you are limited to the fact that in order to review those notes, you need to go back into the book -- they are not stored somewhere separate where the person can just go and review notes from several different. For myself, I couldn't get it to work -- created the personal account, found a book, viewed some pages, but never did see a tab (except on the home page) that allowed me to add notes. This could be a function of my browser -- and if so, makes such tools questionable if they only work within certain browsers


No comments: