Tuesday, April 15, 2008

NetLibrary and WorldCat

I signed up for NetLibrary and browsed through some books--some I was very disappointed in and others I have marked as favorites to review at another time. It is still hard for me adjust to "reading a book" on screen. I read so much other information on screen but not "books" which means I am still very much bound by the conventions of the Gutenberg universe where books have pages I can smell and boards that get bent and pictures that get smeared if I touch them with greasy fingers. I can also flip through pages more quickly but at least some of the books have indices so I can enter the page number in the go to space and get there. For me the value of netlibrary is showing the patrons what the netlibrary refers to on a bib record and helping them sign on for an account.
WorldCat is a resource I am using more and more. I can't remember now the title I was searching but I did find a cite to a book review for it in Worldcat, but it was incorrect. I spent time in Ebscohost going through issue by issue of the source publication with no success. Worldcat is not flawless, but the patrons I have shown it to have been very impressed.I looked up "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith and 2 records appeared from OCL with 5 miles appearing as mileage from my current location. I was very pleased to see one can export to both RefWorks and EndNote as well as "cite this item" with correct citation form for APA, MLA, Chicago, and Turabian. You can also link to the Library of Congress bib record through "publisher description", I think this is a valuable tool especially for our college students so in it goes to my ever expanding toolbox.

1 comment:

Alice said...

Thanks Miss Pea, and let us know how else we can improve your WorldCat and NetLibrary experiences!