Happy NWLD!

Happy National Library Workers Day!

It's been hard to update without internet access at home. I've been staying at work a little late so I can do little online tasks, and I thought it would be good to make a quick entry here. BlogHer will get a little post tomorrow, then a big one or two over the weekend. I need to catch up!

There's not much to report. I'm busy getting to know my new library, the staff and faculty, and what I'm supposed to be doing. I spent the bulk of today in a benefits orientation, so I have lots of forms to fill out tonight.

I did spend some of my day checking out xreferplus Digital Library, which my library has on trial this month. I’m not sure what I think of it yet, but it’s definitely different from other online reference book packages I’ve used. In case you haven’t tried it, xrefer plus includes 200 reference books and extensively cross references the entries. Resources are available in many formats, including sound files, images, and text. The really interesting part of their approach is the “360-degree search,” which basically creates a concept map of search results and shows the relationships between a topic and its related topics and subtopics. I haven’t gotten the hang of the concept map tool yet, but I can see some potential use for it in BI sessions if we do buy this product. It’s OpenURL compliant, which is nice, since we’re currently working on that for our databases and e-journals. Here’s an excellent review of xreferplus by Karen J. Docherty, in the Charleston Advisor. I’m glad we have the trial for a while so I can take more time to monkey with it.