ebsco preferences

I can very much see how the emailing and formatting preferences would be useful to a researcher or student with a big project. I am very no frills with respect to databases - I hone in on the basic common features. I guess I'm used to teaching the basics to freshmen and trying to teach concepts that translate across databases. But I am not the end-user.

I find the visual search in Ebsco much less frightening than the concept map in Credo. It's basically a narrowing of topic by subject heading. It is probably an easier way for student to narrow their search. They start with the broad topic and the narrowing terms are given to them.

credo

Ok as for the concept map in Credo, I obviously do not have that kind of brain, because I find it very strange.

e books

After browsing our collection of NetLibrary ebooks for a long time and seeing many interesting titles, I got nostalgic and picked The Humanities : A Selective Guide to Information Sources, Ron Blazek and Elizabeth Aversa, Libraries Unlimited, 1994. And now that I think about it, it is probably the same edition I have from library school. I just love those specialized reference books. Ok now I'm double-checking the access from our catalog and there is a 2000 edition in NetLibrary too. Not sure why it's necessary to have both.

While not as much fun to browse as a "real" book, I found the NetLibrary version easy enough to navigate.

arXiv

This is pretty cool:
http://www.physorg.com/news142785151.html

"Reinforcing its place in the scientific community, the arXiv repository at Cornell University Library reached a new milestone in October 2008: Half a million e-print postings — research articles published online — now reside in arXiv, which is free and available to the public."