A new tool for librarians: CiteBite

*this was also a message to the MDAUN listserv*

I have a fun new thing to tell you about that will help point customers to specific places on a website.

It's called CiteBite. It's a website that allows you cut and paste a quote from a website in, the source URL and it produces a URL that you can send a customer that will send them the page with the quote highlighted in yellow! This is a very handy thing to have around when you've got a text-heavy site that you're trying to maneuver through with a customer.

Show me how it works!
Say you had a customer who wanted to know about Art in 19th century France. You've pointed them to the page on the NGA website that can help them, but they're not seeing where you're trying to point them ("With the revolution, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and embraced the style known as neoclassicism", second paragraph.)

You can go to CiteBite, enter "With the revolution, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and embraced the style known as neoclassicism." into the Quote box, enter "http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg56/gg56-over1.html" into the source box and click Make Citebite.

You'll get this link: http://pages.citebite.com/x2q1r3s4s3pfr which highlights the area you were trying to point the customer to.

That's awesome! Are there any drawbacks?
A few. While I've done some testing to see if citebite pages show up in the page push area of QuestionPoint and it seems to work, there's no guarantee that it always will.

Also, if a page has frames or tables, it will show only the content in the frame/table that you're quoting from. This may be confusing to some customers as it might not look like the right page. To help, I'd still send the original website (http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg56/gg56-over1.html, for example) but use CiteBite if they're having trouble locating something within a page.

Thanks to Jim DeArmey @ BCPL for the tip & help with testing!