In my pre­vi­ous job, one of my tasks was to cre­ate authen­ti­ca­tion scripts for remote access to data­bases for my libraries. This was some­thing I proac­tively pur­sued because most of my libraries didn’t have a pro­gram­mer on staff who knew how to cre­ate these scripts, let alone a server to run them on. Now that I’m not there any­more, those scripts are no longer avail­able, and it’s upset­ting to think that those libraries can no longer offer that ser­vice to their patrons.

But some ven­dors are start­ing to under­stand that help­ing libraries increase usage of the data­bases they’re pur­chas­ing is not just a good thing to do but is good busi­ness, as well. RSS is a great step in that direc­tion, so I’ve been more than happy to high­light ProQuest’s and EBSCO’s efforts, and I was grat­i­fied to learn recently that OCLC is work­ing on pro­vid­ing RSS from World­Cat and First­Search (via a mes­sage in Facebook).

Another promis­ing step in this direc­tion is the new Pro­Quest Search Wid­get cre­ator, a tool that gives sub­scribers the code to add search boxes to any web page. You can spec­ify a data­base to be searched, include your proxy server’s address, add spe­cific terms to the search for auto­matic “and” func­tion­al­ity, and even change the color and bor­der of the box.

When the user enters a search term, if they’re within an authen­ti­cated IP range or using your proxy server (if you have one), they’ll get right to the search results. If not, they’ll be prompted to log in.

Tip: If you know a lit­tle HTML, you can include the Pro­Quest logo in the code by default and then change it to be your own logo after­wards if you want to add the search box to non-library pages.

Speak­ing of where you could put this wid­get, Pro­Quest gives you some ideas and even pro­vides some mock-ups as sug­ges­tions, but the gen­eral idea is to put it any­where and every­where your users may be. In some of the exam­ple screen­shots, you can see how nicely the search box com­ple­ments an RSS feed of new, subject-specific items from the data­base. The exam­ples are all for an aca­d­e­mic library, but this works just as well for school libraries (class­room project pages), pub­lic libraries (munic­i­pal­ity sites, park dis­trict pages, par­ent net­work pages), and even spe­cial libraries (intranets). Add in your library’s logo, and you have a fairly sim­ple, yet pow­er­ful, way to get your ser­vices off your site and into the inter­tubes your users are using.

Side­note: After almost three years of promises, Pro­Quest is finally sched­uled to roll out RSS in April. Finally, but hooray!