At the retirement dinner for my boss yesterday, I met Ying, our new Systems IT person. She mentioned how nice it was to nap in our comfy library chairs, to which I replied, "That's what they're for." Then I asked her over to the computer to show her Safari.
Safari is ProQuest's new product, designed to rival Books24/7. The full name is "Safari Tech Books Online" and Rob Grindstaff, who I once knew as the local salesman here in Kansas but who is now some high mucky-muck with ProQuest in Michigan asked me to trial it. Too bad there were technical difficulties before the semester was over: summer is really not a good time to test it out.
Ying had fun, though. She wanted "Oracle Certificate" which I searched, then had to knock off "certificate" to get good results. Come to find out this morning after reading the Quick Demo that there's an entire "Certification category" we could have searched on.
She noted that the first results included the best work on Oracle, then we went on to search "Cold Fusion". She was thrilled, and decided to print out an entire book... to which I explained I'd be happy to buy books for the library instead. But you know, books on my shelves are not what she wants... books in her office are.
We've got another faculty member, Skyler, who teaches animation and graphic computer arts and such, and I think this database would solve her problem of students running off with her personal library of tech books.
And a student came in looking for "Flash" books, and I showed him the site, with the addendum of a quick overview of Amazon's reviews, the fastest way I know of getting to the plusses and minuses of any book around.
Finally, I spoke to Pam, the salewoman handling my account now. When Books24/7 first came out, we had it for about $500 that year. Perfectly acceptable price for my small school of 900 FTE. The few users were mostly the tech guys running our network. But the second year, they wanted $5,000. No way could I give them 1/3rd of my book budget!
Here in Butler, with a 5000 FTE, I could afford a little more, but I don't think I would find anymore than a proportional increase in users... and I still don't want it priced at $5,000, which would be the equivalent of 1/6th of my book budget. I really hope I got my point across.
Anyway, go sample it if you are at Butler, right off the library home page.
...And please let me know what you think. I've got a 5 page PDF demo/tutorial I'll send you if you ask for it, although why it's not loaded in the web site is another question I asked Pam.
Singing off,
Micaela
PS. Spent the budget. Wedding, birthday, girls night out, band practice and performance. Finally, the garden. Lost the password. Lost the username. Subconscious found 'em for me. And that's why I've not been posting... and why I'm back.
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