The University of North Texas will soon be making available a free, full-text database of CRS reports. It will overlap somewhat with the Gallery Watch product. I agreed to beta-test it several months ago, but UNT is interested in comments from anyone here at the U, so feel free to add yours (they'll be looking here at what I/we say). The url is http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/. --Amy
Posted by bgi at June 13, 2005 05:07 PM | Email This EntryHey Amy,
Technically we're the University of North Texas - don't want to confuse us with the folks down in Austin!
Valerie: D'oh! the institution's name is now correct...
Comments:
Pros:
-search works w/o a hitch; results are as expected
-hotlinks to author/subject searches in results list
-permalink (looks OpenURLish; is it?)
-pdf icon on results list
-soliciting of reports is clever - should also be a link in left-hand menu
-user can choose up to 100 results to display per screen
-browsing by subject nice and straightforward
Cons:
-too much text on home page; I'd strip all but the last paragraph under "about the project" and add a "more..." link for the rest of the info.
-need a big obvious link to the search within the text section of the home page
-probably should make visited links a different color - I kept wanting to click on the homepage link when I was on the home page
-it would be nice to have icons for non-pdf formats; at first I thought I'd gotten a result that was only a citiation b/c all the rest had the pdfs and this one didn't. Turns out it was html...
-it would be nice to have the icon on the full record, although this could be resolved by simply displaying the full record in the results list; might as well; there's plenty of space between listings.
-small typo on http://digital.library.unt.edu/govdocs/crs/resources/ - a nonbreaking space is showing...
Very nice! I'm quite impressed :)
Posted by: Amy West at June 16, 2005 03:38 PM