Gadgets and more gadgets

Just some musings on the new Credo Reference Gadgets tool . . .

The gadgets tool will appear as a frame on the right side of the Firefox window. If the frame does not appear, you may need to click on the gadgets link in the top center of the Credo homepage.

Not all gadget options will appear on the frame initially. You may click on the + symbol to see what additional gadgets are available and add them to the frame.

Searching within the gadgets is rather straightforward. A search for a word under ‘define’ will take you to entries for that word. The location search appears to have some issues. A search for ‘Atlanta, GA’ did not take me to the desired articles. A search for ‘Atlanta’ did take me to the desired entries.

The conversions tool is a bit simple and compares laterally to similar tools on websites found through a search engine. The conversion answers appear in script below the tool itself and the display is a bit untidy in my opinion.

The quotations tool will take you to entries from quotations books related to the searched for person, as with a search for George Bush, which included both elder and younger. However, due to the slightly dated nature of the Credo materials, a search for Barack Obama through quotations yielded no hits.

The crossword tool allows you to look for a crossword answer. Enter the letters you have and place a ? in the stead of the letters you desire. The tool will pull up a list of suggested answers. There is a drop down list explanatory device that appears with this tool in the form of a question mark icon.

I tested the holidays tool by typing Sweden in the search bar. This took me to a list of entries for holidays that originated in Sweden, followed by entries for holidays associated in some way with Sweden.

A useful tool for ready reference. The image search may lead to students/others using copyrighted pictures in their presentations though. (Even though it is Wikipedia related, Wikicommons is a good source of public domain images.)

-JWF

Credo is available through GALILEO. The password to use GALILEO is available from your Georgia librarian.