Informational listening

22Apr08

EBSCOhost is a good listener.  I want to be in a romantic entanglement with EBSCO.  Is that so wrong?  

In response to a recent post, a company representative (thanks Mike!) suggested that I watch the flash demo for the EBSCOhost 2.0 Visual Search, which enables users to navigate through the results list with interactive mapping controls.  I suppose I’ll need to find a better word than “list” to describe the Results Map.  While I like the new tools very much, I’m not losing focus on what I really want from my database.  Give me improved document views or give me death!  (Some of my students never even realize that they’re retrieving information from a magazine.)

For those of you living under a rock, EBSCOhost is launching a newly designed interface in July 2008.  It’s got handy click and drag capabilities and, my personal favorite, slider controls to refine searches.  I’ve been a fan of this style of web manipulation for database searching since I caught a glimpse of Kayak, a travel site, at a NELINET meeting.  My OPAC should look like Kayak.  Voyager, do you hear me?  It was worth a shot…

Filed under: By: Librarian About Town, News, change or die   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: EBSCO, Kayak, Maps, OPAC, Web 2.0