Did you know that Bloomberg now has a live chat help desk? All you have to do is hit the HELP button twice and a chat window will pop up. Help desk folks are there and will answer you right away. It's easy!

Note that typing MSG and hitting the GO button will take you to a screen with stored responses to previous questions. The Help button is GREEN and doubles as funtion key 1 (F1).

Labels: Bloomberg, databases

Google continues to take over the planet, this time with...

Google Book Search. This new product allows you to search the full text of books that Google has scanned for its vast Google Books project. Book results appear in different formats, from snippets or limited views to full text access. Most results will show portions of the book with your search term(s) in context. Books in the copyright-free zone of "public domain" are downloadable for free. You can even sort results to show full-text books only.

At this early point in the project, Google Books seems particularly useful when searching for older materials, persons or events. SAIS librarians recently had some success using it to find information about an obscure World War II figure. We identified several books that referred to the person we were researching.

As with other Google searches, the Advanced Search Screen is easy to use, especially for phrase searching and limits such as publication date ranges.

Futher reading:

Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote a lengthy piece about Google Books for the February 5, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. It's called Google's Moon Shot.

Also see our blog post about configuring Google Scholar to work with JHU resources.

Labels: databases, google, technology