Thing 17: Elm Productivity Tools

How I wish I had taken the time to set up an RSS feed for a topic search in Gale/Cengage databases at the beginning of the semester! I could be collecting any new published critical reviews on children’s literature without doing any additional work. This is a very cool tool for ongoing research about a subject. I imagine that many students (and library professionals) would find it extremely helpful. The same for the webpage composer in the Ebsco database suite. Who knew creating a webpage could be so easy? And you don’t need any software to do it! I wasn’t able to figure out how to add an image to my webpage but I did manage to download it to my desktop. Ditto for the web page composition tools on the ProQuest database which allow me to share search results via a webpage. These tools may help me make the transition to a truly paperless office. I don’t need to take notes; I can save my search results as a webpage and email them to myself or a colleague! No more cutting and pasting links. I feel very fortunate to be discovering these tools through the 23 things project and will definitely recommend them to students at my library. I have already used NetLibrary in my MLIS study and have assisted library users in using the index and table of contents for search an e-book. The video reminded me that a user can also do a keyword search on the content. There’s so much to learn!