Phone Reference + Internet Based Chat = Sublime

I have been using Meebo as a chat client for over a year now to handle engineering and other subject related reference. One trick that I have added to my web 2.0 arsenal is using a two-edged, phone + chat, approach to reference:

Lets say I get a phone call or am handling general reference at our reference desk and get a phone call there. If I need to get a lot of information to the caller, and it just does not seem that telling them what or where the information is located is not working so well, then I will ask them to go to my profile here at the library on their computer. I then get them to scroll about halfway down the page and I can then send them textual information, web-links to information or databases. This phone-chat hybrid reference is a dynamite combination for explaining hard concepts or difficult situations.

I find that too often we spend a lot of time talking to people, who are already on the Internet, trying to point them to specific web-pages, waiting for them to get everything correct, spelling out web addresses, etc. It is much easier to just hand them the link that they need via the use of a chat client. We can give them more accessible information and do a better job of steering them to what they want this way. It seems less confusing. :)

OU Engineering Toolbar now compatible with Firefox 3.0 and auto-updates

I have finally had time to settle down and setup the OU Engineering Toolbar so it auto-updates. In effect everything you would need to know about fixing the versioning is in this article from Mozilla's Development Center.

The way that you setup automatic updating is by hosting an update.rdf file in a directory the format of which can be found in this web-page. It also requires you to use secure http (https). If you are working with this just check with your systems administrator to see if hosted files use this automatically.

I was expecting this process to take a lot longer time-wise to work it out but it only took about two days to get everything sorted. Now I am going to go down to the Russ College of Engineering and see about getting the toolbar hosted in the computer labs there!

All Science Poster Session - Engineering Toolbar: Portal to Library Services

Several people at the SLA Conference asked me to provide access to the poster that I presented, at the All Science Poster Session. Here is the link to that file. I hope everyone had a great conference and I look forward to hearing from you in the future.

Metalib and EBSCO Allow Many Databases to be Automated-Federated Searching

I just got back from SLA in Seattle, Washington and the conference was great! There are so many ideas that I have brought back and am planning on working with so I thought I would share some of them with you. The first is what Metalib and EBSCO allow us to accomplish, as librarians, when trying to create toolbar applications that search like Google.

When you run a search in Metalib for about 5-10 seconds a persistent URL will appear in the search box of your browser. You can do this for either individual databases, or the federated searches that Metalib provides. If you want to automate that search you need to copy it before it changes to a session URL. You can then of course automate it like I explain in this post.

The advantage here is that there are a large number of databases that Metalib can search through that use non-persistent URLs. The downside is that researchers may be used to specific interfaces. With the OU toolbars searches to a database that can only be accessed via Metalib use Metalib, but if the search box is left blank the toolbar goes to the native interface. Then through instruction I make sure to teach researchers which databases are wired for Metalib.

EBSCO has an option built into it where you can select multiple databases that you want to search. After running a search you can either check the persistent link to the search or add the search to your search folder (either is a persistent URL). When you select multiple databases you can extract a persistent search that covers many databases. So now we can set up searches for toolbars that are federated searches for EBSCO (for whichever databases you want to use).

ENGR Wiki goes live

I have been working on putting together ENGR Wiki an engineering research based Wiki that is now accessible at Ohio University Alden Library. The Wiki has reached a good enough size now that I can release it to the public. I hope you find it interesting though it will be most useful to engineering researchers from the Ohio University community.

The Wiki has a breakdown of useful databases by engineering discipline that are taught at the Russ College of Engineering. It also has research guides about patents, standards, and other topics. It is also the home of the OU Engineering Toolbar.

More Discussion of Firefox Extensions

For the developers and people who have interest. I have found a very useful series of FAQs on Mozilla's Developer forum

As soon as we get out of the quarter and it slows down a bit here I should be able to sign my application and get it hosted so we can automate updates which will be very cool.

Google Sites

Google Sites is an interesting publicly available collaboration tool that the people over at Google are making available to anyone who wants to use it. To play with it you need to provide your work e-mail address and set up an account It does however remind me quite a bit of MS SharePoint which I have been an administrator for at another institution.

This kind of collaboration tool has a lot of potential and encourage you all to take a look at it.