New Links for the New Britannica School

New links for the new Britannica School interfaces are now available:

Elementary School: http://school.eb.com/levels/elementary

Middle School: http://school.eb.com/levels/middle

High School: http://school.eb.com/levels/high

Learning Zone: http://archive.school.eb.com/learningzone/welcome

If you have direct links set up to any of Britannica’s K-12 databases, it is recommended that you use these new links. The new Britannica School interfaces went live this month, and while existing links to the old interfaces will redirect to the new ones, those redirects will only be in place through December 2013. Users of Britannica’s Public Library Edition and Academic Edition are not affected by this change. See this video from Britannica for an introduction to the new Britannica School interface. And watch for webinars from Minitex ROI in the months to come.  

EBSCO Enhancements

Edited from EBSCO We want to let you know about some exciting enhancements to the EBSCOhost and EBSCOadmin interfaces coming in July and August 2013. As part of our continued efforts to constantly improve the EBSCO search experience, EBSCO is releasing several updates and enhancements, including:

• Improvements to the overall look of the Search, Search Results, and Detailed Record pages within EBSCOhost, providing a more visually appealing interface to end users.
• The feature previously labeled Alert/Save/Share is now labeled Share.  All of the existing functionality of this feature remains the same. This change is one of several small updates that further optimizes our interface for language translation.
• Updating the look of EBSCOadmin to provide a more visually appealing and simplistic look and feel to our administrative interface.

In addition to the above enhancements, Visual Search will be discontinued in all EBSCO databases and interfaces.  This change enables us to focus on additional enhancements and improvements to many of the popular features you rely on in our products. We hope that you and your users enjoy the clean new design of EBSCOhost and we welcome your feedback.  

ELM Portal Survey: What We Learned About Library Staff

Matt Lee We ran a survey on the ELM portal between April and June of this year attempting to uncover some of the context to why people use the portal and how successful they feel in doing so. You can see our full ELM Portal Survey Report, but we thought we’d share a few articles over the next couple of months to tease out what we learned. What We Learned, Part One: Library Staff 70 school librarians, 41 public librarians, 17 academic librarians, and 9 special librarians completed the survey. All of the feedback they shared will be helpful for us here at Minitex, but a couple of question responses seem potentially interesting to an external audience. For one, we asked about preferred library news communication channels, and it turns out that respondents to our survey prefer more traditional means of communication. We wouldn’t be safe in generalizing these results to the entire Minnesota library community, but they’re interesting. Listservs, journal subscriptions, and blogs topped the list of ways library staff stay current on library-related topics. In the “Other” category of the table above, respondents mentioned MEMO (Minnesota’s member-driven media organization), email, webinars, RSS feeds, regional library systems, library colleagues, and conferences. We also asked library staff to share a success story about promoting library databases with users and got some wonderful responses. The above is just a small sampling of the success stories we heard. You can read all of the responses to this question in this library staff promotional success document. There are some highly steal-able ideas in here for database promotion. Over the next few issues of Reference Notes, we’ll delve into other portions of the ELM Portal Survey Report to see what it can tell us about students, teachers, and other users of the ELM portal.