BetaZone

The UNL Libraries web developers have recently launched a mobile interface for the UNL Libraries website.  You can find it: http://www.unl.edu/libr/mobile/ .

We want your opinions and feedback on it, so if you could contact us and let us know where we should go from here.

If you a reporting technical problems, please tell us what type of device you are using (eg Nokia 350 phone) and the browser (if applicable).

Just FYI: We are going to be doing some server work this morning.  There may be some downtime for the site, but the search bars and plugins should work fine.

Back in November we mentioned a new site called PubGet.  Now if you are affiliated with UNL, you can get much more content as we’ve been added to the list of supported institutions.  Now you can choose University of Nebraska-Lincoln as your subscription source, or just go to unl.pubget.com and have it switched automatically.

What this means is that using PubGet with this option turned on enables you to get to subscription material that UNL Libraries has already paid for, as well as the free open-access content.

Try it out and let us know how it works for you.

If you go to the UNL Libraries “What’s New” page, specifically this segment, you can see a short video discussing the Betazone, and the LibX toolbar.

The Libraries is experimenting with using more video clips to make announcements and to do short tutorials.  What do you think about this idea?

PubGet {beta} is a free search engine for content in the life sciences that allows users to gain acess to full-text PDF journal content right away. It indexes nearly 20 million life science research documents, including those in PubMed(R).  If the PDF of the article is available, it is displayed in the same window to the right of the search results. For maximum functionality, users should create a free personal account with PubGet. Once located, the PDFs can be saved, managed and shared online from the PubGet account.

We are currently working on getting UNL Libraries in the list of supported institutions, so there will soon be even more articles directly available in this product.  If you do research in the life sciences, it may well be worth your time in trying this database.  If you have any feedback, just click on the black word balloon  on the top of this post and leave your comments.

Edit: We are now on the list of supported institutions. Use unl.pubget.com to get more full-text via UNL Libraries subscriptions.

As many of you already know, all the UNL Libraries printers are attached to UNL’s Uniprint system.  For a while now, many of you have asked how you can print things off your laptop without moving them to a lab computer first.

We now have a beta project that will let you do just that.  Head over to the Uniprint on Your Laptop page to get the software you will need.  Right now this test is only for Windows machines.

The academic year has started up again, and it is time to start planning out what new things we are going to look at.

One thing that has caught my interest is creating a search widget to add to our Facebook page. Other libraries have done it with mixed results, and I want to see if it is useful to you.

Another thing that will probably be a focus this year is improving access for mobile devices. Either seeing what kind of special website formatting could be done, or maybe a even creating a full-blown app for the newer smart phones. There’s been a little bit of a buzz amongst some of the librarians here about mobile access.

Those are two of the areas that are on the top of the list. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. Feel free to post a comment or contact me directly.

I just pushed out another update for the UNL Libraries search bar. Some people were having problems recently when they updated Firefox to version 3.5.2. If you notice any problems, please let me know. The latest version is version 1.5.3 if you are interested.

There’s a lot going on today for the UNL Libraries. We start posting daily on our Twitter account (@UNL_Lib), our main web site starts getting a facelift this morning, and we get an update to main resource search engine, aka ENCORE. This blog will also start being updated weekly again, starting today.

Are you ready for the school year to begin?

Some of you may know that Firefox released version 3.5 today. Our search bar wasn’t completely compatible with it, so I made a quick update and it should work fine now. If you aren’t offered an automatic update, then you can go into “Tools…Add Ons” and then click on “Find Updates” to force it to get the latest version. The latest version is version 1.5.2 if you are interested.