Friday, February 22, 2008

Using the Find Tool with the Tax Help Site

The Tax Help Site is arranged by zip code. However, you may have a customer who is looking for help by a certain day. For example, you have a customer who can only receive assistance on a Wednesday. How can we quickly scan the list in order to find the places that assist on Wednesday?

Click here to find out.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Popular Catalog Searches Now on Public Website

I recently wrote about the creation of popular library catalog searches. We have added this functionality to the public catalog so that customers can access these searches. Just go to the library's home page and click on the "Catalog" tab towards the top of the page. Scroll down the page and you will see "Popular Catalog Searches" with a drop-down menu. Select the type of search and click "Go!".

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Feel Good When You Search the Web

Here are a couple of alternatives when searching the Web that allow you to feel like you're contributing to the greater good.

Whenever you search the Web, you are not only retrieving results from their search engine, you are also retrieving advertisements. These companies that appear under the sponsored results give the search engine a tiny amount of money each time that their advertisement appears. What if a certain percentage of that money went to charity?

You can use GoodSearch, powered by Yahoo! to do exactly that. You first search for and select a charity. Then you can perform your searches. Fifty percent of advertisement revenues will be sent to your selected charity. Please note that if you do not select a charity, then the funds will not be dispersed to any charity.

Just brainstorming... We could add the library as a charity. Then, each day we could set our search engine so that we are donating money to ourselves. It appears that an organization receives about $.01 per search. As many times as we search the Web each day, this would have to be beneficial for us.

Or, you could use Darkoogle, a custom search engine using Google search technology. Basically, it is a dark version of Google; thereby it takes less energy to display on a traditional CRT-box-type monitor. It really makes no difference for the flat-screen-type monitors. You may also find that it is easier on the eyes.

via Phil Bradley and Librarian in Black.