THING 17. ELM TOOLS

First of all, I could not get any of the videos to play.

Create a Search Alert. I did a search in Ebsco Masterfile Premier, but when I tried to cut and paste to Google Reader, it didn't work. I didn't see anything that looked liked the code. At one point I got the ever popular "This page cannot be displayed" message. I tried again several times, with no luck. When I exited, I stumbled onto the Ebsco Q & A page. One of questions was how to create an Alert. I followed the steps. When I tried to cut and paste, I got the message "Oops an error has occured, try again in a few minutes." After trying countless times and wondering if there was something wrong with what I had done, I was finally able to post to Google Reader. I can see the search alert as a useful tool for anyone who wants to collect the most recent articles on a certain subject. It helps to have a lot of patience.

Ebsco page composer. I created an account in Academic Search Premier. I used "globalization" for a search term. I limited the search to full text articles from 2007-2008 and added the first 20 to the folder. For the background I chose the gray worlds that look embossed.

ProQuest web page. I created a web page on ProQuest with the research summary and then emailed it to myself. The whole process didn't take much time and worked easily.

NetLibrary. I did the search on "web site". This bring up 1,695 results. Am I supposed to scroll through all those? The book you are supposed to look for is in the catalog but not as an ebook. I used a different ebook, "Make your web site work for you" by Jeff Cannon. I created brief notes for two of the pages. This was simple to do.

I have used the ELM databases many times over the years and have shown patrons how to use them. I didn't know about the ELM productivity tools. Now thanks to the 23 Things, I can help patrons with the tools when the need arises.