Using LibX and Zotero Together.

The three main difficulties faced by library users are (1) how to navigate among the library catalog, (2) how to search the catalog effectively, and (3) how to manage information once it is found. LibX drastically simplifies the first two tasks, and Zotero simplifies the last task. Put them together and you've just streamlined the entire research experience in a fairly dramatic way. Take a look at this tutorial.

Google Wave Available for Everyone

If you haven't tried Google Wave, now is your chance.

Google Wave Available for Everyone: "Starting today, we are making Google Wave openly available to everyone as part of Google Labs. You no longer need an invitation to wave -- simply visit wave.google.com and sign right in. Likewise, if you are a Google Apps administrator at a business, school or organization, you can now easily enable Google Wave for all your users at no extra cost (more on our Enterprise blog)."

Library Toolbar

LibX is a free, open source scholars' extension for the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers that lets people use services offered by their library. Users can search their library catalog(s) and databases through a search bar or through a context menu. The context menu is adaptive (changing depending on what the user selected) and configurable (allowing the user to include any configured resource.) You can get your own LibX toolbar to search UHMC Library.

LibX will also embed a cue when it sees a book record, for UHMC it is a little rose (the library's flavicon). So if you are searching for books at Amazon, LibX will put this cue next to the book title. When clicked it will perform a search at the UHMC Library and let you know if we have the book.

You may see the cue showing up in other places, like on a Google search. If clicked, it LibX will preform a search of the UHMC Library catalog based on your Google search.

You can also search via your browser's context menu: