iVia Institutional Integration Features

The INFOMINE interface is flexible enough to support a growing number of collaborators. Two interesting aspects of this flexibility are the institutional co-branding and special collection management features.

Institutional co-branding with themes

The appearance of many INFOMINE web pages can be changed with the theme feature. Our collaborators use this feature to integrate INFOMINE seamlessly into their Web sites.

For example, the CSUS Scholarly Internet Resources interface and search result pages are consistent with the CSUS Library Web site.

Here are several INFOMINE searches for the same query term, with the same results, presented using different themes:

A search for forestry using the INFOMINE theme.
A search for forestry using the CSUS theme which outputs the results in the style of the CSUS Library.
A search for forestry using the wfu theme which outputs the results in the style of the Wake Forest University.
A search for forestry using the UCR_library theme which outputs the results in the style of the UCR library's research guides.

Institutional research guides and pathfinders with MyInfomine

MyInfomine (also known as MyI) is a mechanism for creating sub-collections of the INFOMINE collection. Contributors can create MyInfomine Categories, add records to these categories, and perform searches on them.

Here are some categories that have been created by INFOMINE editors:

UCR-DB-MEDICINE is a MyInfomine Category created to track Medical indexes and databases by UCR librarians.
The CSUF-MC-AFRAM category was created by librarians at California State University (at Fresno) to identify college-level African American resources. Several similar categories describe Native American resources, Asian American resources, and so on. The wider MyInfomine Category for general multicultural resources formed the core of the top-level Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Resources INFOMINE category.
On a more modest scale, individual librarians can make more specialized categories. For example UCR-Geo4 is a resource guide created for a specific university course.

Combining themes and MyInfomine

This page of Indexes and Databases is an example of the two tools working together. It contains a list of indexes and databases compiled the UCR reference librarians, each of which is implemented as a MyInfomine category and displayed using a customized theme.