Posts by Chris Carmichael:
Reinert’s Mobile Website
IT’S HERE! We have a mobile website thanks to Curtis Brundy and the fine folks at Springshare/ Libguides. It will automagically display when you visit the library website with your mobile device.
For those of you who are interested, Springshare offers a mobile site designer as an add-on module for Libguides. We are pretty happy with the results.
Upcoming posts
You can tell by the dates on my posts that I don’t write very often. I write when I have something to say, which isn’t to say I’m uncommunicative. In fact, I speak very well and often! But rather than keeping everyone in suspense, I thought I’d give you a preview of the next few [...]
Migration
You know, it wasn’t too long ago I was watching the migration of the Sandhill Cranes. Even more recently, as I was playing golf at the end of May, I saw several “Vee’s” of Canadian geese heading home. Their honking is so plaintive sometimes, you have to wonder why they just don’t stop right where [...]
Taxonomies & Search – Yea!
Semantico’s post from a few days ago talks about doing something with search that users encounter on a daily basis, though they may not know (or care) what it’s called. It’s true that integrating taxonomies with an enterprise search function offers a much greater flexibility in how your users interact with your information. One of the best examples [...]
The Statistics of Federated Search
We are getting ready to compile our library’s annual report and part of that includes a significant amount of number crunching. How many items circulated, how many people came in, how many database searches were done, etc. Well, it’s been a year since we installed our federated search tool, so naturally, we wanted to know [...]
Two projects, one goal
It’s always amazing to me how IT-type projects always seem to take longer than expected. I am just now getting the upgrade going for our Federated Search platform. Supposedly the best functionality of 2 applications were mushed together. (Technical term: mushed.) I’m not convinced yet. However, the second project, a migration of our Research Guides [...]
What else should a federated search tool be able to do?
I’m an information junkie. I admit it – I’m addicted – too much is never enough. And sometimes a federated search result list CAN bring back too many results. Even though they might all be relevant and useful, it can be hard to weed (wade?) through a list of articles, book citations, and associated organization [...]
New Service – Text-a-librarian!
I really need to say “Thank you” to Lacy, a former colleague, for putting this particular bug in my ear over a year ago. WE FINALLY DID IT! CU now has a Text-a-librarian service available as another method for students and faculty to contact the library. Text “ASKRAL your question here” to 66746. Honestly, I [...]
Federated search market getting smaller… we knew this
Yup – we KNEW when we purchased the WebFeat (now locally branded as CrossSearch) platform that the company had been purchased by ProQuest and would most likely be “mushed” (technical term) into something else. As of December 18, 2009, Serials Solutions (also owned by ProQuest) will roll out the upgrade to WebFeat. It will wed [...]
The federated search journey continues OR How many widgets is too many?
Yes, you read it correctly. How many search widgets is too many on a single web page? And why does the question even raise its head? Long story short: we made a decision to selectively federate article databases within our Research Guides. Here’s an example: http://reinert.creighton.edu/research/history.htm The rationale being that a student could come to [...]
