Watzek Library's Digital Services group has been busy this summer applying the concept of a mashup to the L&C library catalog and Summit. According to Wikipedia, a mashup is a "web application that combines data from more than one source to make an integrated experience." If you access the catalog or Summit from the library homepage and you're using Firefox or Internet Explorer (sorry, not available for Safari, yet), you'll notice some added widgets when viewing the full record for books or AV materials. Notably, we are now offering:

• a clickable cover art image, courtesy of Amazon
• a link or search box to Google Book Search
• direct RefWorks linking
• links to a book review search in Academic Search Premier

We hope these new features add to your research experience. Note, however, that the system is in a beta state. Please send suggestions or report bugs to refdesk@lclark.edu. If this piques your interest in mashups, there are many other great examples of them on the web, among them Walk Score and HousingMaps. If you don't find a mashup that does what you want, you can always make your own.

Watzek Library currently has three exhibitions on display: Sisters of the Road PhotoVoice Project: "Look Here! Views from the Invisible Community" (through September 22, 2007) Maps of the Pacific Northwest (Fall 2007) 40 Years of Watzek Library (Fall 2007-Spring 2008) For further information, please contact the Reference Desk at 503-768-7285 or refdesk@lclark.edu

Watzek Library is offering tours to new students on Wednesday, Aug. 29 and Thursday, Aug. 30 at 1pm, 2pm, and 3 pm both days. Come by at any of the scheduled times for an introduction to the library and its resources and services.

Instructors can now place materials on reserve directly from the catalog. Simply find a record in the catalog, click the "Other Links/RefWorks" button, then click the link to "Place this item on reserve". Once you add a few details, circulation staff will retrieve the item and place it on reserve. Please view our one minute tutorial to learn how. Photocopied readings submitted for e-reserve will now be passed through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software during the scanning process. This move will produce files that can be used by accessibility programs to easily deliver information to assistive technologies. Faculty can import reserve lists into Moodle pages. This feature will provide direct links to e-reserves from Moodle. For more details, check out our tutorial.

You may have heard that Google is in the process of digitizing the books in several large research libraries. How can this be of value to someone who does not want to sit in front of a computer to read a book in its entirety? One big value lies in the capability it affords to search the text of all those books for a word, term, phrase or name that you are interested in. You are given the page number in the book where your term appears and in many cases you can go right to that page. Because of copyright or publishers restrictions the text of many of the books is not available, but you do get the citation, page number and often a few lines of text and can find out what libraries or booksellers have a particular book. Give Google Book Search a try.

Choice Reviews Online is the place to go to look for a review of that new book you just heard about from a publisher or colleague. This is the premier source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education.