Research Hacks

This week is Wake the Library.  To find about more, see its page on the library website.  I’ll be working Thursday night.   Hope to see you there!

If you spend all day in Facebook, and would rather avoid leaving it, we have a solution for you! ZSR now has its own Facebook app. See http://apps.facebook.com/searchzsr and add the app to your page, you’ll be able to search the catalog, our list of databases, and the titles of all the journals the library subscribes to. We’d love your feedback. If you add this application to your account and have feedback, please leave it here!

COinS makes websites better for research. It allows you to find out if we offer the full text for cited articles. Without COinS, a Wikipedia bibliography looks like this:

But with COinS, that same bibliography looks like this:

Are you interested? Add the COinS extension to your Firefox browser!

What Should I Read Next? is a website designed for people looking for good books. You can enter a title or author on the main page, and get a quick recommendation, or you can create an account, upload your favorite (and least favorite) books, and get really customized recommendations. Think of it the way you might think of Netflix for movie recommendations or Last.fm for music.

Found via LifeHacker.

Have you ever been away from the computer, but wanted to know the library hours or if a specific movie was checked out?  Now there’s an answer!  You can send a text message to 265-010, type “askzaklive” and your message and we’ll get back to you as quickly as possible.  We’re able to answer text messages whenever the library is open.  Fire away!

Ever wished you could see a list of the books you have checked out so that you’ll know when they’re due? Or to see which one of those DVDs is the library’s and which is your roomates? Did you find a really useful “catalog search but wished that you could come back to it later when you had more time? Or did you want to save a list of the recent New York Times bestsellers in fiction, so you could come over and get them from the browsing collection?

You can do all these things and more with your account, straight from the catalog page.

Find the link named “login.” It’s right under the cupola. You’ll be prompted to enter in 1 + your WFU ID number. Then, you’ll want to enter your last name, and you’re in. Here’s what you’ll find:

• Request Hold/Recall: If you want to check out a book that someone else has, you can place a recall or hold. We can sometimes get a book back for you even if someone else has checked it out.
• My Account: This is where you can find a list of your currently checked out materials and their due dates. You can renew books here, too.
• My Bookbag: This is a place where you can save the names of books you’d like to remember to come back to later. It pulls the call number, too, which makes the list really useful if you print it out.
• Saved Searches: This is where you can save searches that are particularly useful and come back to them later.

Feel free to poke around and try out the different features. You might find something even more useful for yourself!

Life Hacks are productivity tips used by people to deal with information overload. There are blogs devoted to lifehacks and lifehacking, and now there’s one for hacking your research. This blog will give you tips on how to use ZSR resources from the experts. You’ll find tips and tools like how to set up an RSS reader or use citation software like Endnote or Zotero. But mostly, the goal of this blog is to give you real tools and resources that will make your research life easier. Check back often, or subscribe, to find out more!