Alcatel-Lucent has had an internal library website called InfoView since 1993. They always had pages for the various diverse resources they maintained for Alcatel-Lucent employees, such as books, serials, artifacts, market reports, and discounts. Each page had two search boxes: one for a "site" search on all pages and one searching the…

Today data is everywhere. Businesses, governments, universities, scientists, and individuals are creating it at an unprecedented level and pace. Everybody is talking about it. We were just getting used to the concept of gigabytes of data. Then, it changed to petabytes. Now, various technology firms claim that more than an exabyte of data is…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…

Innovations in search and retrieval have provided librarians with some of their most exciting challenges as a profession. Yet even as new tools flood the academic library commons, direct, person-to-person information counseling is still needed, some would say more than ever. Consequently, it can be very useful to study how users conduct new…

In this article, the authors share how cloud-based applications, such as Google Calendar, Wikidot, Google Docs, Google Sites, YouTube, and Craigslist, played a big part in the success of their plan of implementing a technology training program for customers and employees. A few years ago the Denver Public Library, where the authors work, developed…

This article describes the Project Lefty, a search system that, at a minimum, adds a layer on top of traditional federated search tools that will make the wait for results more worthwhile for researchers. At best, Project Lefty improves search queries and relevance rankings for web-scale discovery tools to make the results themselves more relevant…

That little rectangle with a button next to it? (Those things called search boxes but might just as well be called "resource drains.") Imagine it disappearing from a library's webpages. The intricate works behind these design elements make up a major portion of what library staff spends time and money developing, populating, supporting,…

The staff at University of Connecticut are participating in Elsevier's Student Ambassador Program (SAmP) in which graduate students train their peers on "citation searching" research using Scopus and Web of Science, two tremendous citation databases. They are in the fourth semester of these training programs, and they are wildly successful: They…

ScanGrants (www.scangrants.com) is a free, online listing of grants, scholarships, and other types of funding in the health sciences. It is basically a launch pad for anyone looking for money to fund medical research or community/public health projects, or to finance their education in various healthcare fields. The goal is to enable researchers,…