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:
Do you spend much time searching online databases, search engines, and/or library catalogs? Do you use Firefox? If you answered “Yes” to these questions, Firefox has a built-in solution that can streamline the search process by allowing you to search your favorite engines, article databases, and/or library catalogs directly from the location bar.
Part of my daily work as a librarian is searching. I search library catalogs, article databases, search engines, and other research tools available through my library. I use many of the same resources over and over throughout the day and grow tired of pointing and clicking my way through the library’s website in order to launch the search screen of the desired tool. A common resource might be several mouse clicks deep into the library’s site. The navigation and search process for a simple catalog or database search goes something like this:
That might not seem like a great deal of time to the average person, but I usually have a patron standing in front of me (or on the phone) who wants to know if we have the latest bestselling book or a request for a copy of the article on washing machines from last month’s Consumer Reports. It’s within this context that I find it helpful to execute a search query from the location bar of the browser window and have the results displayed on my screen in a matter of seconds. Here’s an example query from a blank browser window that searches Google:
In the above image, the text you see in the location bar “goog information literacy standards” will send a query to Google for the three words that I entered (information, literacy, and standards.) The ‘goog‘ is the keyword that I’ve designated for the Google search engine and everything that appears after it is what I’m telling Google to find. Hit enter on the keyboard and the results will appear on the screen.
So, by taking advantage of the custom keyword bookmark feature in Firefox, I am able to streamline the navigation and search process to make it look like this:
Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox allows you to assign a keyword for a search URL so that you can query a search engine, library catalog, or database by typing in the assigned keyword followed by a search query in your browser’s location bar. In previous versions of Firefox this was known as a Quick Search (although this phrase no longer appears to be used to describe this search method, I continue to refer to it as such.)
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches
If you don’t already have Firefox installed, you can download it from Mozilla.com
Follow these steps to create your own Quick Search bookmarks for those sites you use on a frequent basis:
You should now be able to execute a search for Ask.com from the location bar by typing: [your keyword] + [your search words]. So a search for ‘information literary standards’ would look like this:
ask information literary standards
Hit enter and the search results from Ask.com will appear on your screen:
While the previous examples focused on free search engines, the same process can be applied to other research tools like library catalogs and subscription databases. Here’s a list of some of the resources I search using the Quick Search method:
When using the Quick Search method for catalogs and databases you might consider establishing several Quick Searches for each resource. For example, I use the following keywords for my local library catalog:
The research databases available for searching at many public and academic libraries give users with a great deal of control over the results via limiting. For example, users can limit settings in databases to only show items that:
The Firefox Quick Search can be used to include these limits as well. To do this:
In some cases it may be necessary to manually edit your bookmark to properly configure where your search terms appear in the URL. The directions Mozilla provides for doing this are:
You can also create it manually:
- Do a search on the site you want to add a quicksearch to.
- Bookmark the page you are brought to (the results page).
- Open the Properties dialog for your new bookmark.
- In your bookmark’s URL (the Location field), find and replace what you searched for with %s (If it does not appear, you cannot use a quicksearch here)
- Add a keyword
Part of my daily routine has me using Microsoft Word to create handouts, research guides, and fliers for the campus community. Sometimes I give these away in paper format, but more often I’m finding that many people are starting to prefer an electronic copy (that can be printed if they really need it). One of the problems I’ve found with distributing electronic copies of Word files is that the formatting and fonts used on my machine may not be the same as everyone else’s machine which can change how the file is rendered on the recipient’s machine. I can eliminate these issues by converting these files to PDF.
For those who don’t have a full version of Adobe Acrobat (US $299 – or less if you’re a student or faculty member), free options are available. Sure, you’ll have to sacrifice many of the advanced features that come with the Adobe product, but if you just want to distribute straight-forward Word documents, give this a try.
This online conversion site allows you to upload and convert the following types of files:
I experimented with a couple of rather complex MS Word files (featuring floating images, text boxes, images enclosed in text boxes, header & footer, URLs, arrows, and drop shadows) by uploading them to Zamzar along with my email address. About five minutes later, I was notified via email that my PDFs were ready to go. I clicked the link in my email notification and downloaded the zip file to my computer. The results were excellent. I was expecting some formatting problems with all of the floating text boxes and images in my Word file, but there were none.
I like the many conversion formats that Zamzar supports–it’s like a one-stop-shop for converting some of the more frequently used file formats. The site is still in beta so you may encounter some bugs along the way.
