Access conference 2005 October 19
I’ve been at Access 2005 since Monday afternoon. I missed the hackfest on Sunday and the Monday morning sessions. However, I really enjoyed all of the sessions I was able to attend so far. Ross Singer from Georgia Tech was doing some interesting things with Firefox extensions, however, as he brought out, only a small minority of students/patrons will actually install these things. I’m finding that to be true with some of the Firefox Seach Plugins. While these things can be quite useful, it is sometimes hard to get patrons to install library-specific extensions and plugins. One specific thing that Ross mentioned they were using at Georgia Tech I want to look at is OpenSearch which uses Amazon’s A9 search. He has it searching Google, the library catalog and other sites at once. I think this same idea can work good if set up for local catalogs. If I could search, for instance, TCNJ, Rider, Mercer County, and the State Library catalog at once, I can find items I (and most TCNJ students/faculty) can drive and pick up in less then 30 minutes. This can be quite useful for “last minute” paper writing that students often end up doing.
Another idea I got was using spiders to crawl and index librarian-recommended websites and making our own searchable index of reviewed sites. I’m not quite sure how the site selection process would work, but I think it is worth looking into and may have potential.