Enhancements to Demographics Now!

As we began the renewal process for our Gale package for 2014, we were offered a great deal–we could add Business & People to Demographics Now, making it a very robust tool for entrepreneurs, planners, small businesses, and librarians who love to map and report.  You access this through Research>Business>Demographics Now and then select Business & People from the tabs.   There is help available (upper right hand of the screen) if you get stuck.

Gale has also created a great set of training videos for this product.  Scroll down to Online Resources and then select Demographics Now–Business/People.

Other than this terrific enhancement, the Gale package will stay the same for 2014:

• Biography in Context
• Opposing Viewpoints
• Student Resources in Context
• World History in Context
• US History in Context
• Literature Resource Center
• Price It
• Demographics Now–Business & People

Enhancements to Zinio

Thanks to Nancy Messenger for sharing this:
ZINIO CHECK OUT PROCESS – with the performance speed, image and experience improvements, there are a several notable enhancements to the library collection checkout process.

1. To checkout, click on the Checkout button or Checkout Now link. A dialog box will appear offering the choice to KEEP BROWSING to check out more magazines, or START READING to be redirected to Zinio.com.

2. To START READING, a second tab for the Zinio.com reading collection opens (the user will be prompted to log in if not logged in and display the image on the Zinio.com log in page.)  The patron will no longer see the dollar value in their payment history account profile screen. The magazine will immediately appear in the user Your Reading List pages.

3. Users may toggle back to the Magazine Detail Page tab to check out a 2^nd magazine.

4. When a 2^nd (and any subsequent magazine) is checked out during the same browser session, an ADDITIONAL browser tab for Zinio.com will open each time the user chooses to Start Reading.

5. As a new feature, when a user goes back to the Magazine Detail Page tab and attempts to check out the SAME magazine issue again a message appears letting them know that they already checked out that issue. At this point, the user may choose, again, to Keep Browsing or Start Reading.

These checkout improvements/enhancements provide a better experience for the patron to visually show them the result of their check out action.

 

Any questions or feedback, please contact ziniosupport@recordedbooks.com

Farewell Thomas!

Hello, Congress.gov.

November 9, 2013 – 9:57pm — Bibliofuture

On November 19th, Thomas.gov, the venerable website of the United States Congress, will begin to redirect visitors to Congress.gov. The new site, which launched in beta in September 2012, will become the primary governmental resource for the text of legislation, past, present and future, along with reports from committees, speeches from the floor of Congress and cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

Top GVRL Titles in October

Lots of travel planning going on…

Amsterdam 2011

The Rough Guide to Tokyo e5 2011

Tokyo 2011

The Edible Mushroom Book, 1st American ed. 2008

VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever e2013 2013

Knives and Swords 2010

Foods of Korea 2011

Lupus 2010

The Encyclopedia of Trauma and Traumatic Stress Disorders 2010

The Value of a Dollar: The Colonial Era to the Civil War, 1600-1865 2005

Farewell to HeritageQuest

It’s never easy to let an electronic resource subscription cease.  As we were renewing our subscription to World Vital Records this year, we looked closely at our usage of that product compared with HeritageQuest.  The Reference Services Committee was surprised to see that usage of HQ was slowly decreasing and the usage of WVR was increasing:

	2012		2013
	HeritageQuest	World Vital Records	HeritageQuest	World Vital Records
January	8965	168	5040	8787
February	8101	4373	5186	8431
March	7572	6698	5156	7490
April	7652	12800	4517	9607
May	5289	6256	5873	17013
June	5582	9385	3500	11822
July	3815	8758	3856	16457
August	3770	9562	3945	14099
September	5088	11338	4947	16664
October	5008	8494	5104	11082
November	4531	10501
December	4359	7533

We originally subscribed to HQ for its census images.  We wanted to provide a product for US Census images to our home users, but unfortunately when HQ was acquired by ProQuest the indexing of the 1930 census stopped–it’s still listed as partial, as are many of the state indexes for the 1940 census.  WVR now has the entire run, 1790-1940, as well as many databases that are included in AncestryLibrary (not available from home).

When we evaluated the content, the cost, and the usage, we made the choice to continue with World Vital Records and drop HeritageQuest.  There might be some impact on the customers who used the product for county or family history books, but those can be obtained through interlibrary loan.  This is effective December 31, 2013.