Thing #17: ELM Productivity Tools

Here's another Thing that I really didn't know much about before working on my Things. The feature I had used was to set up a search alert to watch for new articles on Dog Parks for a task force I was on. That made the first part of this Thing easy. To keep with the theme of this blog, I set up an RSS feed for articles on geocaching, of course. I suddenly was linked to 43 newer articles. Awesome!

I then logged into Ebsco and tried out the Page Composer. I tried some of the page formatting features and I saved it to my PC. I have to admit that I didn't get very far with this. I downloaded a very simple web page. I can see this being fun and helpful for students though.

Next I went to ProQuest Newsstand. Again, I searched for geocaching topics instead of those suggested. I used the refine feature, which was a great idea, since I started with over 1000 hits. I ended up getting it down to 71, and marking 5 and creating a page with those. I clicked on the "download" button, but couldn't tell if that worked at all. I then used the "email" feature and was able to email all the links to myself quite easily, and I think that is a really good feature. I love the email feature on all of these databases, and often recommend it to patrons so they can easily keep track articles they found helpful. Knowing more about how to send a bunch at one time is even more helpful!

Last, I went to NetLibrary, very grateful that I remembered my user name and password I had created at work, since I an doing this from home. I was able to get in and search the ebooks. Unfortunatley, I had no luck with the term "geocaching." I switched to the broader term "treasure hunting" and found some books. I looked in the Idiot's Guide to Sunken Treasures, and made some notes. I had never noticed that feature before. That's pretty cool!

If I was doing some serious research and needed to keep track of some great resources I found in ELM databases, these tools would be very helpful!