Idea: add a link on each subject guide to the most recent ebooks from our collection - the link would automatically do a subject search of the catalog and sort the results by date, showing the most recent first. It's not perfect, but I think it works pretty well.
Here is an example I did for behavioral sciences:
Current Titles from the E-Book Catalog
This would be especially helpful if/when we expand the subject guides to have ones for sub-disciplines such as nursing, computer science, etc.
Here's one I did for nursing:
Nursing E-Books
Let the group know what you think.
Dana
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3 comments:
This is a great idea. What's not perfect? What doesn't work?
I like the idea that we can provide this information to users. I think the successful execution of this is in the details. If we went with this approach, we would need to provide contextual information so the user would know what to expect - - i.e. list new titles in xxx subject area displayed in the ESC book catalog. If you're a book catalog user, it's unlikely you'll be surprized when you see the list. On the other hand, I feel strongly that book catalog displays are ugly and uninviting. I know this is shooting for the moon, but I'd much rather see selected MARC record data be exported as XML into a clean looking web page that was part of our site. I'm not ruling this out, I just wish there were other more attractive options.
the reason I would advise against the idea of experting xml data is that in the long run this requires upkeep and maintenance on a regular basis (this is basically what I'm doing right now with LibraryThing widget on our blog - but it takes me at least an hour+ to do it each month, and that's just to add about 20 select titles, regardless of subject). With the option I suggest, once the search link is set up, it requires no further maintenance - new additions to the catalog will automatically be added to results displays.
In addition, I think our catalog results display is simple and easy to understand so wouldn't cause too much confusion.
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