Best Performance in a Vendor Demo...

We see a lot of vendor demonstrations in the library world, but today's session from Jade Green (got to love that name!) from Bowker was outstanding... energetic, fun, and very, very informative.

Ms. Green gave us some lively updates on Global Books in Print, which is packed with good features....
Scholars can check the "Forthcoming" feature to keep current;
Children's book lovers can search by age and lexile rating, look for series, bring up lists of award winners, and access the subject directory A-Zoo in the Children's Room;
Those with a special interest (be it chemical peptide synthesis or Cockapoo puppies) can set up a Global Books in Print alert and receive notice when something new is published;

A quick tour of Fiction Connection and Patrons Books in Print....
You can search bestsellers by year way back;
You can get recommendations for what to read next;
You can find author biographies;
You can search by TV and radio shows to find that elusive but interesting book from an NPR show or the Imus Show, for example.

An exciting peek at Syndetic Solutions...
This is a program that interlaces with the online catalog to provide cover art, reviews from many sources, recommended similar titles, tables of contents, and other fab features. This is a very attractive product that could really enhance our online catalog....


and then we talked about RCL...
Resources for College Libraries, a collection analysis tool that will let us compare our holdings to recommended core titles.


And this all happened in an hour! We learned a lot and we actually enjoyed ourselves. And she somehow converted me into a blogging advertisement for Bowker! Global Books in Print is available on our Journal Articles/Databases page... Fiction Connection and Patrons Books in Print will be listed there this summer.