Encore, updated!

This blog has talked about the new III product, Encore, before. Today was able to sit in on a demonstration of it live, for the first time to see what it does!

Positive features:

• Its version 2.0 that will be out later next year will have the tagging and commenting feature included in it.
• it includes "facets" as part of search results which let you limit by various criteria such as location, type of material. these are nice value-added features
• would include a prominent link to prospector catalog

Negative features:

• the federated search box ends up in the lower right corner which does not much promote the research databases. disclaimer: this can be moved (yea!)
• the other part of the federated search they showed is that search results were returned by names of databases. if you were joe patron, would you click on "general onefile" to know you were getting article results? disclaimer: this was probably demo'd with iii's research pro federated search product. if another product was purchased would different results show?

there are a number of library catalogs which have the encore 1.1 beta out there if you want to take a look. i've listed a few below*****go search and play. tell me how you'd rate your patron experience with encore!

nashville public library

scottsdale public library

michigan state university libraries