Our interim arrangements for interlibrary loan seem to be working well. We should be switching back to having direct requests within MnPALS and MnLINK next Monday.
Teacher Reference Center is a new resource provided to us at no cost by EBSCO, the database company for many of our databases. Primarily of interest for for the Education program, it provides indexing and abstracts for over 280 of the most popular teacher and administrator trade journals, periodicals and books, covering assessment, curriculum development, literacy standards, and other topics.
OCLC, the worldwide mega-catalog service that provides us with WorldCat, has been interested in "weaving libraries into the Web" for some time. One earlier project was to make "find in a library" links in Google and other search engines. If you do a Google search on a book you're interested in and add "find in a library" it will let you check whether its avaialable for borrowing locally. In another weaving project, they now are allowing users to add content. Like Amazon, you can post your own book reviews and ratings. Or your aunt can post a glowing review of your book. Like Wikipedia, anyone will be able to edit content if they don't like it. Of course, whether that is a good thing remains to be seen ...
Microsoft is going head to head with Google Scholar with their beta Academic Live. Currently this search engine only searches journal content for the disciplines of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Physics. Gary Price reviews it in The Resource Shelf; Information Today also provides a preliminary assessement.
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