Thing #17 -- ELM Productivity Tools

Gale and Search Alerts: I'm quite familiar with search alerts in general, although I haven't created any in the ELM databases. I use them in a few different databases to inform me of book reviews in subjects related to my liaison departments. Last year I showed faculty in one of my departments how to create search alerts and this fall I created a search alert tutorial for them using Wink.

As long as I'm (peripherally) on the topic of the Gale ELM databases--One tip I picked up a few months ago from a colleague at another institution was to publicize the K-12 focused databases to students in the education department here. I realized they could be helpful to students for creating lesson plans and other aspects of their student teaching.

EBSCO's Page Composer and ProQuest web page creation: This is kind of funny--After reading this Thing I remembered I had previously played with the "create a web page" function in ProQuest, but didn't think I knew you could do something similar in EBSCO. Then when I opened my folder, there was a web page already sitting there. Guess that functionality didn't make too much of an impression on me!

I'm not sure I would use either of these a lot since I have other web editing tools available to me. However, they could be useful for our students as one way to save articles they were interested in. Putting their marked articles in a web page allows them to be clickable for easily retrieving them later--something they can't do with a paper printout from the database.

One way I might use these tools is when I am helping students with their research via email. I'm more likely to simply suggest databases and search terms than to send them actual citations--we are a college, after all, and they're supposed to be learning to do research themselves. But if I wanted to include citations, doing so as by attaching a web page with articles linking into the database would be a good way to do it.

Something I don't like about ProQuest is it doesn't allow you to create an account and keep your results or web pages beyond the current session.

NetLibrary: I've tried reading books on NetLibrary several times, and every time I'm reminded how much I hate reading on the computer. Given this, I can't imagine wanting to take my notes online. I believe some of our students have discovered the note taking function in NetLibrary, but many of them just want to print off pages from the books they find.