Firefox at the Reference Desk

By Stephen Francoeur -- Library Journal, 12/15/2006

Can a web browser make reference work a bit more efficient? Probably, if you are using the Firefox browser. For several years, the Mozilla Foundation has been releasing new versions of the open-source Firefox browser, a tool that has been quickly embraced by a growing community of volunteer developers building free extensions that can make the browser smarter and easier to use. It is these add-on programs that turn an elegant browser into a handy Swiss Army tool right at the reference desk.

A student recently asked me for help finding articles on the history of reform in higher education in Chile. Little did she know that she would walk away a short time later with a customized handout featuring screenshots of complex search queries on her topic that I set up in the advanced search screens of several databases. If I had been using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser instead of the Firefox browser, creating such a document on the fly would have been more laborious.

Using Snapper, a free add-on to the Firefox browser, I simply clicked the program’s icon in the browser, used my mouse to select the specific portion of the page I wanted to capture, and then copied the already cropped image straight to Word. I was able to fit three different screen captures on one Word document, thus providing the student with a customized set of instructions on how to build her search in relevant databases.

Snapper is but one of many invaluable add-ons to Firefox that I have found helpful. Although at the moment Snapper does not work in Firefox 2 (the latest release), it does work in Firefox 1.5. As Mozilla releases new versions of its browsers, the band of developers designing add-ons frequently has to scramble to update the extensions they have designed. Most of the add-ons that I rely on, such as L2 and BookBurro, had no trouble making the transition to the latest Firefox release.

The add-on L2 expands the data I have at hand to share with patrons when viewing an item record in my college’s Ex Libris Aleph 500 catalog. When an ISBN is visible on the screen in our web OPAC, the L2 script opens a small window that when maximized presents jacket art, book descriptions, and customer reviews from Amazon.com. The L2 window also gives me a link to run a lookup for the book in WorldCat.org and LibraryThing and it shows me prices at a number of online book retailers.

Working in a reverse direction from L2, the BookBurro extension waits until you are viewing a book on Amazon before it presents you with a window that shows prices for that item at major web retailers. More useful to the reference librarian, though, is the way that BookBurro uses WorldCat to list nearby libraries that own the book. Links to those libraries usually take you not to the WorldCat.org record, as you might expect, but to the item records in those libraries’ catalogs.

Of course, reference work involves much more than finding books. Tracking down articles often involves searching multiple databases, a small number of which require the use of Internet Explorer (such as Factiva). Rather than having to toggle between Firefox and Internet Explorer on my screen, I instead use the IE Tab extension in Firefox, which opens up any link in a new tab in Firefox but uses Internet Explorer to render the page. To put it another way, I am using Internet Explorer within the Firefox browser window (and databases like Factiva are none the wiser).

There are also times when you give up on your library’s databases and give Google Scholar a try. Firefox can make your searches there easier, too, if you have installed the OpenURL Referrer add-on, which offers a customizable link in search results to your library’s link resolver. The OpenURL Referrer will also connect up search results in the Google News Archives to your link resolver.

One last Firefox trick can be a real time saver at the desk. It is not unusual for a search query to work better in one search engine. Sometimes you just want to run the same query in a number of different search sites until you get what you want. With the Firefox search box embedded in the toolbar, you can run the search in one engine, scan results, and then using a dropdown menu in the toolbar to select another engine and quickly run a new search without having to retype your query. The Mycroft page on the Mozilla web site offers hundreds of search plugins that can be added to your list of options. I can now fly through searches in Ask, A9, Clusty, Exalead, Google, and Vivisimo as well as IMDB.com, MedlinePlus, Answers.com, and hundreds of other reference sites on the web.

Over the past few years, Microsoft must have been paying close attention to the way Firefox’s extensibility had spawned a universe of easily installed plug-ins. Its new Internet Explorer 7 browser now features a library of extensions (also referred to as add-ons). Unlike Mozilla’s, however, Microsoft’s add-ons are not all free. It is also likely that it will be a long time before Internet Explorer users can count on having as rich a collection of tools that Firefox users do now.