Survey of Library Automation Software

http://tvcalert.com/tvcalert/transfer.asp?xmlFile=c.xml#sv
(28 Jan) Kathy Dempsey reports on Marshall Breeding's international survey of library automation software. "Polaris ILS, from Polaris Library Systems, drew the highest user-satisfaction ratings for every question....

Research Asset Management: 7 Ways to Improve Your Resource Bank

This article in Information Outlook, the member magazine of the Special Libraries Association describes how "Effective management of your organization's information assets can get you answers more quickly, save staff time and preserve institutional memory."

Library Systems vendor, Inmagic identified seven themes for the effective management of research assets. The company also determined how organizations that are deploying best practices in managing research assets gauge their effects and calculate their benefits.

The article provides an overview of those 7 practices, along with insights on how information professionals are implementing them.

Inmagic customer & power user Jennifer McNenly as Osler Harcourt notes that
"The firm’s knowledge management and reusable work product databases are among the most heavily used assets in the firm. "


The article notes that "
When Olser ranked its research assets in terms of restoring critical services in
case of an emergency, its Inmagic databases were deemed highly critical . . ."

This article's overview of Access to and Reuse of research assets provides a valuable tool for evangelizing best practices in your library and describing its benefits to management.

48 ILS systems listed in this month's buyer's guide

Handy grid at INFOcus lists 48 ILS packages and their suppliers.

ResearchBuzz Writes: New Options for Advanced Google News Search

Tara over at ResearchBuzz had an interesting column at the beginning of the year. She writes: Google has announced a couple new options for advanced searching of the Google News service. First there's the fact that advanced searching and operator searches work for all versions of Google News now -- great for folks using the non-US versions.

Second is that suggested sources has been implemented for the advanced search page. If you start typing the name of a source in the source search box, Google will give you suggestions. So if you type Houston, for example, you'll get a variety of suggested sources including Houston African-American News, Houston Business Journal, Houston Chronicle, and so on. (I guess this would also be a quick way to see if your media source is even listed in Google News.)

Third is that source search is not limited to the exact name of the source. Before if you used the source: syntax, you had to be exact or pretty close with the source name for Google News to find results. This was annoying. Now you can use the syntax with an incomplete name and you'll get results from all sources with your keyword in the name. This could be useful for topical searching -- try doing a query with source:business or source:agriculture or source:retail.

Here's another fun one -- do a general source search combined with the location syntax. I think I want an RSS feed of television station stories in Texas. source:tv location:tx would do the trick.