Thursday, June 4, 2009

Thing 17

I'm very familiar with the resources available through ELM. That will all change, of course, with the new additions to ELM just announced and taking effect this July. I was lucky enough to take part in the selection process and am awed by the wide array of databases that will be available to individuals in Minnesota, South Dakota, and North Dakota. My lone lament is the sorry fact that many people including students and school teachers are unaware of ELM and what it can provide. Until we mandate that ALL schools have media specialists information literacy and education in general will continue to suffer.

The search alert function in many of the databases and I can see my faculty at UMM making use of it. I set one up myself in Academic Search Premier. The "Create Web Page" function is less useful in my opinion and seems to be a lot of work for little benefit. The "Note" function is interesting. I played around with it a bit. Since UMM has a site license to EndNote writing Notes in individual database items is unnecessary (and a bit cumbersome).

RSS feeds have always been a bit of a frustration for me. If they can be delivered as an email in a separate folder I am happy to receive them. Otherwise it's just one MORE place I have to go to retrieve information or communicate.

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