Thing 17: ELM Productivity Tools

It is always good to learn more ways to make better use of the tools we already have. At the time I was starting this Thing, I was also asked to prepare a bibliography, so I had a chance to try these out with my own searches, as well as the 23 Things samples. I set up an RSS feed from Academic Search Premier into Google Reader and it actually worked, at least at first. When it tried to update itself later, however, I got the message that it was “unable to locate” the alert. Oh, well. It must be the Web-based aggregator problem. This shows the limits of interconnectivity. As much as we would like things to work together, no one really believes that Jack Bauer can download information from government spy satellites to his PDA. The RSS alert I set up in Wilson Web to help me keep a new pathfinder up-to-date, on the other hand, seems to still be working.

It used to be only Westlaw and Lexis that could update your searches on an ongoing basis like this. When they first came out with this feature, we used to run the searches for the faculty. Now anyone can do it themselves. It is very useful while you are in the process of writing a paper to be able to keep apprised of new sources. Faculty who have a continuing interest in an area like being able to keep up with it on an ongoing basis, too.

Trying to use the Page Composer to make a Web page in the EBSCO host seemed clunky and awkward, while ProQuest’s Web page creation process was simple and slick. I used to think making notes by copying text into a Word document was the cat’s meow. Being able to create an html page directly would make it easier to place search results into a wiki for times when many people were collaborating on the same research project. Ditto for NetLibrary and their electronic notes feature.