The most important thing I learned at ALA is…

…UCR (and all UC campuses) have access to ProQuest’s Pivot service!  See http://pivot.cos.com

What is Pivot? Here’s some info from ProQuest:
Locating and securing research funding is becoming increasingly competitive, as funding opportunities are limited and the number of researchers vying for those dollars continues to grow. Gain a competitive edge when identifying funding opportunities with ProQuest Pivot, a web-based discovery and workflow tool that combines a comprehensive source of global funding opportunities with the largest collection of scholar profiles into one intuitive solution. With Pivot, researchers, faculty and research administrators can easily explore new avenues for funding, view funding opportunities uniquely matched to their scholar profile, collaborate with colleagues and manage the results of the process to build a funding strategy that supports both immediate and long-term funding needs.

How did I find out that we have access?
When I was cruising around for interesting e-resources, I first discovered Pivot on the ProQuest research solutions product page.   I thought: an online service that helps connects researchers with funding opportunities, especially grants?! That’s just what the library needs to fulfill our new mission of helping to support faculty research and grant-winning!

So, part of my mission at ALA was to visit the ProQuest “booth” (it was really more of a pavilion) at ALA, and see a live demo. Surprisingly, one of the sales specialists told me that all UCs have Pivot through the Office of Research.

So, what next?
Well, first, I thought that was typical – another department on campus being involved with something that the libraries would have liked to know about, and could have promoted, and here we are not knowing a thing about it.

Secondly, I thought how great it is that we aren’t paying for it out of the library budget. Third: I’m going to add it to the Scotty catalog and website when I get home! So I did: see http://scotty.ucr.edu/record=b4553026~S5 , it is also available via the databases A-Z List.