Searching High and Low

Having used OCLC’s WorldCat (?) for my entire professional career I was pleased to see Roy’s post detailing a recent tour of the OCLC computing facilities. It is interesting to see how much physical space is required for mass storage and how those space demands have shrunk over the years. Roy goes on to describe the amount of data:

Bill Rogge, who is giving the tour, points out a long structure taller than us that holds a tape library for mass storage. And he means mass. How does ten Petabytes sound? Think you could store enough music and videos on that to keep your teenagers happy? For hard disk storage there is a relatively paltry 180 Terabytes, which is nonetheless still enough to keep your teenagers happy.

For those outside the library world, WorldCat can now be searched for free at http://www.worldcat.org.

OK, so I skipped lunch today and of course saw that ResearchBuzz updated their Cookin’ With Google tool. It’s a customized Google search engine and lets you type in some ingredients and get back a list of recipes. Hmmm what’s in the office fridge….

Generating RSS feeds from Ebsco database search results just got easier. Now all you need to do is click the “Create alert for this search” link after running a search to generate a feed to the results.

The feed URL will display in a little popup window
and can then be taken to the feed reader of your choice.

Any limiting options that are set during the initial search (full text, peer reviewed, etc.) will carry over into the results displayed in the feed list. Ebsco has vastly improved this Ebscohost feature (although I wish the feed title could be edited.)

VuFind, an open source project launched by Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library, looks to be a very feature-rich overlay to the traditional online catalog. Although still in beta, it appears to be working toward implementing many of the same features that I recently saw in a presentation for the AquaBrowser library catalog overlay. The developer(s)? have Voyager covered and have these fine systems on the roadmap (hopefully in this order as my lib is moving to Sirsi): SirsiDynix, III, Aleph, Evergreen, and Koha.

The Kept-Up Academic Librarian recently pointed to an article in the Daily Herald about a Utah Valley State College professor who abandoned the use of a textbook

Hammond was teaching a race relations class last year and had assigned a textbook that cost about $80. Unfortunately for the students, the publishing company released a new edition and none of the students could sell the book back.

“All these students had to eat that book,” Hammond said.

That caused Hammond to re-think textbooks. Now, instead of assigning his students textbooks, Hammond assigns them reading material from journal articles and original research available on the Internet or in the library.

The good news is that many academic libraries and their parent institutions have ample resources to assist faculty in developing and delivering course readings to students. Traditional library reserves, electronic reserves, e-book collections, direct linking to articles within journal databases, and course management systems are all tools that can be found in most academic libraries.

The bad news is that a typical faculty member might not feel comfortable enough with many of the above to pursue a path away from a textbook. And that’s the easy part. How many faculty members have the time and commitment to do this:

Since then, Hammond has gotten rid of all the books textbook companies had given him. He re-did all of his courses, basing his tests and quizzes on the new material, writing his own questions because he no longer has access to banks of questions that come with the book.

It took him all last year to re-write the material for his classes. [emphasis mine]