Thing 17 ELM

Before getting to the Electronic Library for Minnesota (ELM) another Paris shot, this one from the Musée d'Orsay. One of the strategies we employed in many of the Paris museums was to concentrate on a particular format or time period, for example paintings or 19th century. This worked very well and helped us not to feel overwhelmed by all the riches surrounding us in each of the collections. In a way, it was kind of like setting up a search alert in ELM. You create the limits for the materials you're looking for and then let it all come to you.

I've got search alerts set up in the EBSCO databases for anything relating to Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes. Once a week I get an e-mail with any hits that have come up based on my criteria. I take these hits and export them to my RefWorks database and then once a month, after a little formating and editing, post my findings in my ongoing Holmes and Doyle bibliography found on the web page for our Holmes collections.

In playing around with the Page Composer I found it a little clunky. It isn't really easy to stick an image on the page. It seemed to work best with text and background, but when you wanted to add other stuff it got a little more complicated. Like anything else, the more you play around with it the easier it will get.

Creating web pages in ProQuest was a breeze. I'm still trying to figure out how I might use these pages, for example, in a class or for some kind of presentation. I'm sure the opportunity will present itself.

The notes function in NetLibrary could be interesting as well. I did a search for Sherlock Holmes books and found quite a few. This would be a way to create some annotations with the text.