Mark O'English University Archivist      Contact:  Terrell Library 12E Phone: (509) 335-2739 Fax: (509) 335-1889 e-mail: markoe@wsu.edu Mailing Address:  PO Box 645610 Terrell Library 12E Washington State University Pullman WA 99164-5610

Mark O'English

Presentations

Library Podcasting at Washington State University. Washington Libraries Association Annual Conference, April 20th, 2007.

Technology Widgetry

I keep playing with widgets to make library use easier. I have a slew of small ones here at the top of this section, but all the stuff done by the small ones above the next horizontal line can be done by one of the two larger ones below that first line.

If you would like to search the WSU Library catalog from the built-in search box (not available in IE until version 7) on your browser, click here to install a search tool to do so. Click here to install the same thing as a title search instead of keyword.

For that matter, click here for one for the Neill Public Library.

Here's an interesting widget from the LibraryLookup Project. Drag the "search Griffin" hyperlink at the end of this paragraph into your bookmarks or onto a toolbar. Then, when you're looking at an item in Amazon or any site which contains an ISBN as part of the web address, you can click on the link to see if we have that ISBN at WSU. NOTE: this only searches for that specific edition; if we have a different edition, the search will miss it: search Griffin
Or, I've whipped up the same thing to let you search Summit

This is a cool widget with some introductory info. Be aware this is a Firefox extension/trick – I don’t know how to make it work for IE, though there may be something out there.

Go to: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3682 Install the widget that can be found there (there’s nothing to it – just click “Install Now” and it does it all).

If it didn’t install: please note that if you have an older version of Firefox you may need an older widget (the installation will fail and tell you this). You can check your version by going to the Firefox dropdown menus at the screen top and clicking on HELP then ABOUT MOZILLA FIREFOX. On the above, look for the “Complete Version History” (just a few lines before the “Install Now” box) link and find the appropriate older version there and install that one.

Okay, so you have the widget. Now what??? Well, go into any search box anywhere on the web. Right click in the box. You can then add that search into the “Google box” in the upper right part of your browser. Henceforth if you click on the symbol up there in that “Google box,” you’ll get the usual dropdown list of search tool options and the search that you just saved will be there along with all the other options that came with your browser.

“So what” you ask? Well, some cool things:

a) It picks up nearby modifiers. Go into Griffin. Set the left drop down menu to “Title.” Set the right drop down menu to “Journals, Magazines, Newspapers.” Right click in the searchbox and save it into the “Google box.” If you go up and select that search option, when you put in a search term and hit enter it will search Griffin for that title in journals, magazines and newspapers. Cool, but nothing yet amazing.

b) It works in some (but not all) or our proprietary databases. Go into Web of Science. Right click in the search box, and add that search to the “Google box”. Henceforth, you can search Web of Science from your desktop without having to go through all the “Article Indexes and E-Journals” rigamarole to get there. Unfortunately, Worldcat is one of those it doesn’t work for. :( It does, however, work for Ulrichs. Still, its definitely moving into very useful territory.

c) “a” and “b” above can work together. _This_ is where it gets cool for me. Go into SearchIt!, and go into CrossSearch specifically (this is where you are trying to search multiple databases at once). I went into Engineering as a subject, and placed checkmarks next to EiCompendex, Inspec, and Web of Science. Then I right clicked in the search box, and saved that into the “Google Box”. Now, just from my browser searchbar I can metasearch those three databases no matter what web page I’m actually on.

The drawback: with this particular tool, you won’t know which of our proprietary databases it won’t work for until you save the search and test it – the older versions _may_ tell you when you try to save a search if it will work or not (my version does), but the newest version definitely does not! If it fails, shrug it off and delete that search option from your menu (there’s a “manage searches” option below all the searches there which will let you rename or delete them). By the by, if it does fail but you really want that search, try switching from advanced search to simple search (or vice versa) if they’re on a different web page. Sometimes one will work when the other doesn’t.