BetaZone

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.

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.

Hi everybody, hope the summer is treating you well.

I just wanted to drop a quick note letting you know that we’ve redone the UNL Libraries Facebook page. We had to delete the old one to get some options we wanted, so if you were a fan before - we would love to have be a fan again!

UNL Libraries — University of Nebraska - Lincoln Libraries’s Facebook Page | Promote Your Page Too

I just wanted to post a quick note letting you all know that over the summer, posts will probably come a lot less frequently. I’ll still get a post out every once and a while, especially when we do something new, but probably not one every week.

If you happen to be a fan of the UNL Libraries “classic” catalog, then you might like a new feature that popped up yesterday. When you look at a record that has a call number, you’ll see a new button that will send the call number information right to your cell phone. No more needing to find a scrap of paper! There’s still some bugs, as with most new things, but it works quite well most of the time.

Try it out here.

This feature isn’t available through our new Encore search yet. Let us know if you like this feature enough for us to push for it to be in the future editions of the Encore software!