Wednesday, January 28, 2009




Well, having the digitized reference titles is a great thing for sure! I don't think I would have any problem convincing customers that it is the 'real thing' and that is just as trustworthy as paging through the physical book, but....

As with any electronic resource there are things that just don't seem to work correctly and so can be frustrating at times. For instance, I searched for Sojourner Truth within one of the biographical titles. I selected the very first entry with a 100% relevancy rating. Just under a photo near the top of the page there was a "view PDF" hyperlink. When I clicked on this it only brought up one page. So it is clearly important to choose PDF from the "Tools" box on the right side of the screen. If someone had chosen to go with the first PDF displayed, they would have missed the large majority of the actual entry!

As for typos, when using VideoHound I selected The Last King of Scotland. The digitized version on GVRL had wordwrapped the title into The Last King ofScotland--I wonder just how many typos of this kind there might be? Many I would surmise....

All in all, it is a great resource, but once again, we can rest assured that our jobs are secure--people will always need our assistance!

P.S. Translation is a cool tool!

P.P.S. Since we have VideoHound here in full text, I would love to get my Halliwell's back as a standing order Reference work, and ditch the paper VideoHound!!! Ah, how will we ever keep up?...

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