October 6th, 2009 Brian Herzog
I don’t think this is a new thing, but my Director recently showed me Edelweiss Interactive Publisher Catalogs.
It appears to be geared more towards bookstores than libraries, but Edelweiss is a free product from Above the Treeline for searching book vendors’ catalogs. The goal seems to be to avoid wasting the paper of printed publisher catalogs, which I am all for. Searching can be filtered to limit to certain publishers or topics, and that is useful, but sometimes, flipping through a printed catalog is just better.
More features and explanation from their homepage:
Why edelweiss?
- Paper catalogs are out of date and inaccurate before the ink is dry.
- Reduce expenses and environmental costs by eliminating wasteful catalog printing and reaching more, and more targeted customers.
- The American Booksellers Association has endorsed edelweiss as the preferred solution for its membership.
- Search keywords, authors, excerpts, and more across all participating publishers and catalogs.
- Easily tag, filter, sort, view, and export title lists in custom formats.
- Exchange notes, comments, and suggested order quantities between peers, publisher sales reps, and retailers.
So what’s the difference between searching this and searching Amazon? The filtering for one, but the last point could make collaborative ordering easier. However, we use an entirely different system at my library, and are unlikely to change.
Tags: above the treeline, abovethetreeline, book, Books, edelweiss, libraries, Library, maretials, ordering, public, search, searching, selection See Also
Posted under Books, Library, Technology | No Comments »
June 18th, 2009 Brian Herzog
Even though I use Google for web searching most of the time, I do use other search engines, and I wonder how the results compare.
With the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, a Microsoft employee must have been wondering the same thing - so he created a neat Blind Search tool (and states this is not a Microsoft project).
Type in a search term, and Blind Search shows you the results from Google, Yahoo and Bing - but without telling you which engine produced each list. So without brand bias, you decide which results list includes the most relevant websites.
And the best part is the reveal, when you “vote” and see which search engine the results came from.
I played a bit, and surprisingly, Google didn’t always provide the most relevant results. As the creator states, this seems most useful as an observational curiosity, but it certainly is fun and interesting (or, it gives people a way to find pron three times faster).
via Closed Stacks
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Posted under Technology | 3 Comments »
January 31st, 2009 Brian Herzog
This is the question of the morning:
Is the internet broken?
Apparently, Google was having trouble this morning. Every search result from a Google search (even google.com) is tagged as “This site may harm your computer” and links to the Google page to that effect. From what I can tell, every single site on the internet is being blocked from Google search results.
A little while later, the message became “Forbidden” - I’m guessing this is a result of Google employees working feverishly to correct this problem. So far, I haven’t found any news stories about this, but I’m sure it’ll be explained before long.
In the meantime, I’ve been teaching people how to type “yahoo.com” into the address bar instead of the Google search box - I told you this chart was accurate.
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Posted under Library, Reference Question, Technology | 3 Comments »
January 29th, 2009 Brian Herzog
It’s funny when the interweb incidentally produces something this accurate:
Via LibraryStuff.net
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Posted under Random | 2 Comments »
January 13th, 2009 Brian Herzog
Speaking of learning things, Chris sent me a link that lists special strategies and syntax for searching Google more efficiently.
I use a couple of them all the time (especially site:), but I definitely spotted a few that will be extremely helpful:
- +[stop word] - having the plus sign before a “stop word” (such as +not) forces the search to include that word, instead of ignoring it
- inurl: and intitle: - similar to site:, but this limits the search to words just in the web address or title field. Very useful for increasing relevancy on obscure information
- related: - lists websites that are “related” to the domain you search for (ie, related:swissarmylibrarian.net). This seems just oddly interesting, but there has got to be a very good application
The page also gives some great examples of how these can be combined. It’s always good to learn how to search smarter, and it’s certainly a conversation starter when patrons see me typing in these weird codes and getting better results than they do - always on the lookout for those teaching moments.
Thanks Chris, and to the faculty of the Valencia Community College for compiling the list. There are also other lists, too, but this one was very helpful.
Tags: codes, engine, google, libraries, Library, public, search, searching, syntax, tips, tools, tricks See Also
Posted under Technology | 3 Comments »
