Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Which pieces loosely formed make a difference

My favourite definition of Information is "a difference that makes a difference."

I'm trying to make sense of the use of our library and of our online resources and there's so much information that is not just context-dependent but multi-context dependent.

Let me try to explain what I mean.

Our library's SFX resolver allows can generate a list of our most "popular" serial titles and according to it, the most popular title on campus is "Dissertations Abstracts International". The second most popular title is "Dissertations Abstracts B". Then comes, "Science" and then, "Nature" and the other usual and unusual suspects.

And I *think* I know why.

At MPOW, most of our indexes are hosted by Scholars Portal Search (using CSA's Illumina interface) and the default that we have set for these indexes is that all linking to full-text articles happens dynamically through our SFX "Get It!" buttons.

But there are a small handful of exceptions to this policy because the links occur automatically from Illumina including...

digdissert

But is that a difference that makes the difference?

1 comment:

Tim said...

SpotDocs has some hints on how to turn those requests for Diss Abs to actual results in Proquest Dissertations: http://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/sfxdocs/SFX+and+Dissertations

It's a very elegant solution.