Friday, December 21, 2007

Happy Holidays

We'll be on break till January 2, 2008.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

The warm smells surround us

Holiday baking is proceeding full oven ahead. The scents of spices waft through homes and businesses as bakers share the joy!

How do you find new recipes to enthrall your friends and family? Magazines have recipes by the thousands. Is it possible to weed through all those beautiful issues to find the best recipe?

The ProQuest database in GALILEO has a way for you find new recipes. Proquest indexes Gourmet, Southern Living, Good Housekeeping, Redbook and others that provide culinary delights on a regular basis.

Do a basic search, open More Search Options, limit your document to recipes. They provide a drop down screen with Document types- recipe is an option.
You may Set up Alert, which will provide you with regular e-mails of new recipes!

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Ebsco's Visual Search update!

Some time ago I wrote about Visual Search and my confusion with its usefulness.

Ebsco sent this out today:
"On 11/21/07, we announced plans to upgrade the Visual Search option on EBSCOhost and other user interfaces, at the end of this calendar year. We are pleased to announce that the new version of Visual Search is about to become available to your users.

Please note that a comprehensive tutorial will open automatically when a user clicks on the Visual Search tab in EBSCOhost, to guide them through the functionality of the new Visual Search screens
."
That comprehensive tutorial just might do the trick in helping those of us who just don't get the picture!

Monday, December 17, 2007

Waiting for the day

You know how you wait and wait for an event? The anticipation builds. The day arrives, your heart is beating wildly- you go and ---- you know the feeling?

This morning I went to my computer before the crack of dawn to try out the new GALILEO interface. It wasn't up. At school I opened this e-mail from Lauren Fancher, Director, GALILEO Support Services:

Dear GALILEO Users,

GALILEO is pleased to announce the upcoming release of four new interfaces for each of the GALILEO user communities: Scholar (academic), Library (public library), High-School, and Teen. The initial designs have been available for review and testing in beta since early October.

During that time, revisions have been prototyped based on the findings of usability testing, development for these revisions has been in process, and critical issues uncovered in beta testing are now being addressed prior to the production release.
The majority of the usability findings addressed the need to further clarify differences in navigation between the user views through color and design; functionality will not undergo major changes. Screen shots of the final designs are available for review at:
http://www.usg.edu/galileo/about/planning/projects/upgrade/redesign.phtml

We had hoped that the release would occur at the transition between Fall and Winter school calendars in order to have the lowest possible impact on users, given the year-round services libraries provide, and had been aiming for the coming week of December 17th.

Work continues to prepare the four new interfaces to appear in production within that window; however, the revisions will not be ready until the first week of January; a fifth interface intended to replace the Kid's interface now in production is being revisited based on feedback from usability and K12 stakeholders; the current Kid's interface will continue to be in use through January.

Thank you for providing help and assistance with this release and the many positive comments you have shared – we hope that the timing of the release will be acceptable and appreciate your understanding.



As the saying goes- if it's worth having, it's worth waiting for...and better to do it right than to do it over. We go back to waiting. I'm glad the staff at GALILEO want to get it right.