Searching High and Low

Over the past few months I’ve been experimenting with ways in which my library can integrate itself into our college course management system, Blackboard. Initially, I started with handouts, PowerPoint presentations, and links to the library website. But lately, I’ve been exploring how we might embed search forms for catalogs and other research databases directly in Blackboard. Here’s what a basic search form for my library catalog looks like in Blackboard:

And here are a few search forms that can be used to search Ebscohost databases:

I’ve been saving the HTML used to create these forms in the Course Management Resources section of the site. In Blackboard, the code can be copied, pasted, and saved into most content areas. Just remember to select “HTML” as the text type instead of “Smart text” or “Plain text” (so that Blackboard will render the code as a form instead of as text.)

The Chronicle mentioned an interesting software tool written by University of North Carolina that will convert an exported Blackboard course and its content to a static webpage that can be viewed without having to login to Blackboard.  The program is called bFree and UNC has released it under the Creative Commons license.

I noticed this afternoon that Google has loaded millions of patent documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. According to the FAQ, it covers approximately 7 million patents from 1790 up through the middle of 2006. The scanned images loaded very quickly when I tested it (see example below) and didn’t require the use of a third part TIFF viewer. A couple of months ago I was searching for patents and had to install IrfanView (a nice image utility) in order to view patent images on the United States Patent and Trademark Office site.

Read the FAQ to see content information and the advanced searching options that are supported.

Just read about weather and webcam site, Weather Bonk. It’s a mashup site that uses Google Maps to help users locate weather and traffic cams via a city map. It must have recognized my location by IP address because my city’s map was displayed as soon as I went to the site. Have a look at the complete webcam page for Pittsburgh.

I recently created some search forms and wanted to share them with others on this site. In order to do so, I needed to convert the underlying HTML so that it would be displayed as text and not rendered as the form. These converters proved very helpful and saved me a great deal of time:

• Displaying HTML Source Code in Web Pages
• Code Converter