Today is a very unusual day for me. My little Miss7, My Lila, is down with what appears to be a mild case of the flu. I say mild, because she is pretty well normal when hopped up on tylenol or ibuprofin and triamenic cold. Let that slip, however, and she is back to misery with a fever, aches, and minor congestion.
So, I am home today with her.
Being home, I am not embroiled in the heated battle of day-to-day librarianship, but I am poking a bit at projects and emails here and there as I have time.
The hottest topic for today is a discussion of our LibX Firefox browser plugin. This magical beauty of a Firefox extension is just amazing! I am tickled to peices over it, and I cannot wait to show it to faculty and students come fall.
Essentially, once you downlaod this brilliant little thing, which Alexandra Chappell, the librarian at CUC that created it says was easy peasy to make, it runs a toolbar across the top of your Firefox browser, above the tabs. You can set all sorts of cool preferences, search by keyword, author, title, subject, or ISN, or drop copied text onto a ’scholar’ button that will shoot off a Google Scholar search.
But wait, there’s more! For only 19.95… Ha, Ha, kidding
But wait, there is more! The gem of this cool tool is that it inserts open url links into things. Let me say that again – it inserts open ulr links into things, like LibraryThing, and Amazon, WorldCat, and Google search results. That means, I can browse amazon and click on our Mr Blais image, and access our open url form to either search our opac or log into ILL. No logging into the proxy server, no opening a new tab or window. Just a teensy click. Whoa, that’s awesome! I think faculty will love this, seeing if we own or need to buy things for upcoming semesters. I think students will love it for hunting up required and recommended readings. I love it because it’s DAMN COOL. It is a great step towards a better integration of outside the library and inside the library tools.
So in addition to us talking about the neato things this does via email, we also began to brainstorm how we can tweak our open url resolver window to include ‘request this item for purchase’ links, which then broke down to a workflow issue, which broke down into a discussion of other things that must be done first, which broke down into….
ah, work politics. : )
