Excitement about liberry stuff

I don't usually go off the deep end here about University Library goings on, but today's unveiling of the new Library Gateway has me all in a tizzy. The default "Easy Search" on the main page is actually a federated search, which means you are searching not only books, but also journals, magazines, and web sources. I tried a search on "Harry Potter" (with quotes) and found all sorts of unexpected, yet delightful sources. From scholarly databases like Web of Science and Scopus, I found articles with such titles as "Harry Potter and the Curse of Headache" (yes, a medical article about Harry's headache types) and "Harry Potter and the Structural Biologist's (Key)stone" (in a journal called Genome Biology). Google Scholar took me to 14 articles that cite a book called "Harry Potter and the Bible: The Menace Behind the Magick." Then there are the results from I-Share (books in other Illinois libraries), Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Books, Academic Search Premier (Ebsco), Expanded Academic ASAP (Infotrac), and so on... Very fun.

I'm also excited about all the digitizing that's going on. At a meeting yesterday I learned more about access to the Library's holdings in the Open Content Alliance. Mr. Sutton's history seminar students, get ready! Just do an "Easy Search" on "open content alliance" and "Lincoln." Bootiful. Now I'm going to have to rethink the way I teach searching. But I am NOT complaining!