Thursday, March 13, 2008

ELM Productivity Tools Thing 17

These ELM tools are fantastic! I can see showing patrons who are interested in a certain topic to get alerts for magazine articles about that topic. The web page composers seem like the perfect place to organize information for a paper or topic. I wasn't able to save my pages because I don't have a flash drive, but I e-mailed them to myself. This seems like a very useful function for people who don't want to make a lot of copies at the library. It can save money and energy. They can just e-mail themselves the articles. I really like the note-taking function in net library.

I wish I could say that I will be collaborating with colleagues with these tools, but a public library is a little different in regard to colleagues. I think these tools would work well for school librarians who are helping a colleague compile current research on certain topics. The proquest web page would be a good way to show your research to colleagues and help to save them time.

I think these enhanced tools should benefit students greatly. On the whole, the general public that I work with is not research oriented. It is fun to get students in who are doing serious research, but it really takes time to show people these tools and I am lucky if I can show people that we have these sites, let along showing them the enhanced features.

I would like to add that NetLibrary is about 8 years out of date. When I was teaching at the college level, this was a very new database and many books were added. Now it looks like there aren't too many current books available. I have used it for nonfiction, but the books were from around 2000.

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