Category Archives: search and discovery

OAIster

By Iris | Published: Friday, March 5th, 2010
For those of you who don’t know OAIster, if you have any reason to search for digitized primary sources, you should check it out. It’s a union catalog of digital library holdings. It’s chief asset is wonderfully descriptive metadata. And like with other collections of collections, I recommend searching OAIster to find which digital collections [...]
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Seeing Search Boxes

By Iris | Published: Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
We’ve all heard that single search boxes are the only way to go when it comes to building search interfaces. We’ve probably also seen students who will bypass all relevant information or links on a page and zero in on whatever looks like a search box. But I never put these two pieces of knowledge [...]
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Crazy Thought

By Iris | Published: Thursday, May 7th, 2009
Thinking about the things that I like about Google or about library databases in comparison with each other after my last post, I realized that library databases need crazy-easy URLs. I don’t click through 2 or 3 layers of a website to get to Google. I type “goo” into my address bar, which fills in [...]
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I Really Wish It Were Easier

By Iris | Published: Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
Tipping point: reached. Up until maybe the middle of last year, it was pretty easy not to worry too much about the problems of doing “real” library research on the free web. “The kids are doing it” was a phrase that simultaneously helped us to worry about the state of information literacy in this web-ified era [...]
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Anti-Choice (or Pro-Simplicity) is Nice When You Can Get It

By Iris | Published: Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
We’re knee-deep in our MetaLib implementation project, and as we do our best to make decisions about our interface, we keep removing all the extra links and options and tabs that clutter up the default interface. Do we really need two different ways to get to the database list? Do we really need both Simple [...]
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