Thursday, November 1, 2007

Thing 22 Overdrive, NetLibrary and Project Gutenburg

This is so frustrating. I have viewed the guided tours and introductions to Overdrive, NetLibrary and Project Gutenburg for two days and the information I search for is not found. I searched for author Adriana Trigiani and for title "Kite Runner" and got no hits using the pages provided through this training. Now a search in our HIP catalog shows they are not yet available.
On a more positive note, the Overdrive guided tour on our HIP catalog under category "e resources"( called the MD Digital eLibrary Consortium) is the same as the the My Digital Library tutorial for 23 Things. The customer is warned that the downloadable audio or electronic book is playable only on a pc or MP3 player, not on an iPod. Everything from installation to download to burn audio to CD is included in clear instructions for the customer. This HCL digital library tutorial is easily found and requires little input from the librarian. The download advantage of no overdue fines and of no return trip to the library are mentioned as selling points to use this feature. I found titles searched for in our HCL Horizon catalog by searching by call number for "downloadable audio" and for "electronic book".
The NetLibrary tutorial on how to transfer files was easier to understand because they showed screens from their catalog and moved the curser to appropriate places. The narrator had a nice friendly voice and the screens were clear. The narrator offered many tips for novice users, such as save to a disk. She also had strong graphics about not to attempt to download to iPod, palm or Mac. I read somewhere that HCL no longer subscribes to NetLibrary for audio books, only for eBooks., and an employee confirmed this.
Project Gutenburg tutorial was offensive to me in their clumsy attempts to get money. They seem to specialize in classic fiction and texts. Of their "Top 100 Books", number one was a manual for surgery, number twenty six was Adventures of Hucklebury Finn. I was not able to locate a title I wanted to download.

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