Monday, March 17, 2008

Thing Seventeen

Elm Productivity Tools

I hate to admit it, but I actually had a hard time with this. Far more then usual, or what I would have expected myself. Though I've worked full time at the library for over a year now, I'm not a librarian and I haven't had to deal with any of our databases like our librarians do. I went to the ELM website, and was really confused as to where to go to find things. There general layout when you first log on, sorted by categories seems nice if you're just looking around. But looking for something specific, wasn't as easy. I browsed around, and it did seem a little intimidating. I also tried to setup that RSS feed to track the search results, but it didn't work for me. All in all, I'm sure this is pretty useful to those that actually have something they're searching for specifically, or know what they're doing, but I didn't feel totally comfortable just browsing around with no real intent or purpose. Obviously lots of libraries use this on a regular basis, and many people are helped because of it, so I understand why it's one of the 23 things.

1 comments:

Linda said...

Having had to help many school library people and some of the general public with ELM, you have hit the nail on the head. Even when you know what you're doing this interface is not very intuitive, nor is it easy to navigate from the comments I've heard from users and my own experience.