July 4, 2012. ALA 2012 marked the unveiling of BrowZine Academic, our first product to be released later this month, and we could not have been more pleased. We met with over 100 librarians from institutions around the world, some who had heard of BrowZine before and some who were seeing it for the first time. Everyone shared a lot of great feedback about BrowZine. Things we heard included:
- Browsing is important. Many we spoke with enthusiastically noted how BrowZine will help those students who come to the library needing to find "a peer reviewed article in a civil engineering journal" and appreciated by faculty who like to "keep tabs on their five or six favorite journals."
- Simplicity equals adoption. BrowZine's simple design and intuitive interface means people will use it. As some joked, if students and faculty can download Angry Birds, they can use BrowZine.
- Scholarly work flow is key. BrowZine's easy export to services like Zotero and EndNote means BrowZine integrates well ino the work flow of researchers. Some asked about our support of other tools like RefWorks and took this back as homework: we are looking to provide export options to this and other services soon.
- Who are you guys? It is exciting to launch a new company but daunting to enter an industry dominated by big names (ones we even used to work for!). We look forward to having you hear more about Third Iron and BrowZine.
Thanks again to everyone who came by to see us and for all the terrific support and feedback shared during ALA. It has been a very exciting time this past year developing BrowZine and we look forward to making the announcement of release soon.
If you have any questions or input, we want to hear from you. Please sign up for our mailing list or contact us at info@thirdiron.com. Things are going to be great, we can't wait to work with you.
