by Ellen Hampton

What is a “widget”? Widgets (also sometimes called “gadgets”) are portable web applications that personalize and customize your web experience. Do you have an iGoogle or MyYahoo! start page? Do you use Mac OS X or Microsoft Vista? These personal portals and computer desktops provide places where you can easily add widgets that bring content from the web directly to you, or give you a jumping off point to search and discover on the web.

Other types of widgets include extensions to your web browser – the popular open source browser Firefox has made these browser add-ons popular – that do such things as adding customized search engines to your toolbar, organize content you find on the web, block unwanted web advertising, and a whole lot more!

The Baylor Library now has a web page (http://www.baylor.edu/lib/rli/widgets) that lists some popular library and research related widgets for the Baylor community. Included on the list are

• The LibX Baylor University edition Firefox add-on, which provides direct access to the Baylor Libraries’ resources by adding a toolbar, right-click options and embedded cues to your web browser.
• Baylor Libraries Search Widget, which searches the Baylor Libraries’ web site, BearCat by keyword, title or author, our subscription databases by keyword and subject, e-journals by title, across multiple subscription databases at once, Google Scholar and Google Books. The widget is easily embeddable onto any web page, content management system, or personalized homepages like iGoogle or Netvibes.
• The Zotero Firefox extension which helps you collect, manage and cite your research sources.
• And many more! If you know of a helpful widget or browser add-on, please let us know!

If you have any questions about web widgets or would like to know more about how to use the widgets listed on the web page above, contact Ellen Hampton, E-Learning Librarian at Ellen_M_Hampton@baylor.edu or (254) 710-2968.

by Margaret Lemon

Fall 2008 marked the beginning of a new era for advising at Baylor with the introduction of the new Unified Advising System.  This central web-based advising tool was heavily used for setting advising flags, issuing permits, entering course advice for students and storing notes about advising sessions.  Almost 300 advisors made use of the new system during the fall advising season, setting advising flags for more than 10,000 students.  In addition, course advice was entered by advisors for more than 8,000 of the students advised during the period.  This course advice is available to the students in BearWeb to remind them of their advisor’s recommendations while registering for the next semester.

As with any new system, there were a few bumps in the road in the beginning, but the vast majority of the feedback concerning the UAS was positive.  As problems came up, they were addressed quickly, making for a very successful debut.  From the comments received, it was clear that advisors appreciated having all the information they needed about a student in one place.  The “what-if” degree audit was also a really popular feature of the new system, allowing advisors to simulate a student’s change in academic program.  This functionality was also added in BearWeb so that students could run their own simulations.   All in all, the Unified Advising System was well received and a great success.

If you would like more information, please visit the Unified Advising System web site.

In mid-March, the Ray I. Riley Digitization Center will be home to a new Cruse large format, high resolution scanner.  Cruse scanners are used world-wide by organizations such as Beethoven Museum in Bonn, Germany, the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, the Vatican’s Secret Archives and NASA / Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, to name a few.

The new scanner will allow Riley Center staff to scan maps from the Frances Poage Map Collection currently house by the Texas Collection at the Carroll Library.  Funds from the Frances Poage Map Collection Endowment were used to help purchase this 2,000-pound scanner, which can handle documents up to 33 inches by 88 inches.  For more information, please email Darryl Stuhr or call (254) 710-7356.

In this Web 2.0 world that we all work in, it is important to provide students with useful, dynamic research tools that provide information in a variety of formats. Thanks to a software product called LibGuides from Springshare, the Baylor Libraries are doing just that.

We will be updating our research guides from .pdf files with hyperlinks to guides that have the capability of providing embedded RSS feeds, podcasts, videos, Del.icio.us Tag clouds and user feedback. The Libraries are interested in getting content to our users, and with LibGuides, we can connect on Facebook, Del.icio.us, Twitter, other websites, blogs and courseware systems. We can be where the students are!

With LibGuides, we will continue to provide research guides that provide students with subject-related information or course-related information. The possibilities are endless. If you would like more information about this update contact Ellen_M_Hampton@baylor.edu or Sinai_Wood@baylor.edu or take a look at our site which is currently under construction: http://researchguides.baylor.edu

The Ray I. Riley Digitization Center is abuzz with activity this semester. The staff is working on several digitization projects including the Texas Collection’s original catalogs from Baylor at Independence, a Nineteenth-Century Women Poets Collection from the Armstrong Browning Library and Oral History transcripts from the Institute of Oral History located in the Carroll Library building. These collections will be full-text searchable and include full meta-data.

To view these collections and see the others available from Baylor’s Electronic Library, visit contentdm.baylor.edu.