Last one

I know it sounds ridiculous, but for me the biggest discovery was that all these resources were available to our patrons. As a new librarian, I have been steadily working to learn all that I need to know to fulfill my job responsibilities. The previous librarian either wasn't really technologically savvy or she didn't see the possibilities for patrons. I have spent some time in the past few months making resources accessible to our patrons (we didn't even have an online catalogue) so it was great news that these databases were available! I very much appreciate the opportunity to learn what these databases contain and how to use them so I can then transmit information to our patrons.

As I have worked through this class I have printed out the information sheets provided by the State Library. I made a binder at the library that is labeled "Online databases" and put these info sheets in the binder and placed it on our computer table along with a sign. I have also made an effort to tell people who I think might be interested in using them like students, college students, and community members who do research. I intend to launch a media campaign shortly to inform the community of all the new happenings at our library - new hours, databases, weekly story time, book club, and ebooks coming in the summer.

Ancestry Library - photos and maps

After talking with Julie I was able to navigate to the photos and maps section of Ancestry.  I did a search on South Dakota in the panoramic maps section and that turned up 151 records.  There were amazing photos from many of the SD towns, Rapid City, Lead, Sioux Falls, Yankton, Deadwood, etc. There were also photos of Indian Schools and a stock parade. All of the photos seemed to be from the late 1800s through early 1900s. I also looked at a couple of the maps, I just love old maps! There seems to be alot of stuff kind of hidden away in this database. I'm glad I found the links to other things besides the name search. I'll probably have to go back and look at the photos of the old ships because that sounds really cool also!

Ancestry Library, Heritage Quest, Sanborn Maps

These are really cool databases! A real time sink! Okay, when I searched for my own name I found my husband's name and his records from about 15 years ago plus. I had to search on my maiden name before I found myself and then it seemed like old census records, no birth records or anything. While messing around in this database though I did find a copy of my parent's marriage record - the original obviously typewritten with a carbon copy, nearly impossible to read, but there it was.

Next I searched on my grandmother and  found that using her maiden name didn't work well. When I finally searched on her married name I found a death record and an obit notice. I also found a census record from the 80s. Kind of funny that we'd have opposite results, but I guess it makes sense since she was her married name for longer than her maiden name and I was my maiden name longer than my married name. I am wondering if there are incomplete records from the early 1900s (when she was born) and maybe that affected my search.

I looked and looked for the photos and maps tab in Ancestry and honestly couldn't find anything that even remotely resembled that. Am I looking in the wrong place? I do not know how to search for a place in Ancestry.

In Heritage Quest I searched books for Tucson, AZ and got 6 results. I clicked on the Arizona State Business Directory from 1930, Denver, CO Gazetteer Pub. It was really cool! It was a listing of all the businesses, banks, hotels, senators, universities, forests, dept of labor, etc from that time. I found a listing for the lumberyard that my grandfather managed during his working life. It was so interesting to see all the names of people who ended up having a huge impact on Tucson as it grew into a huge city. I grew up in Tucson and remember it being a small to mid-sized city but these records are of a Tucson that was a bustling town - pretty neat!

In Sanborn maps I wanted to look at Wall, but since that wasn't available I search Rapid City since that is really the only other town in South Dakota that I know anything about. In 1885 there wasn't much to Rapid City, lots of liveries. I couldn't find anything I recognized. In 1915 there was more to choose from, although not too much. I did find the courthouse. It seems like things really started happening in 1930 because the town really grew and there were alot more recognizable buildings such as the Masonic Temple and the Alex Johnson Hotel, that are still in use. I wonder what happened to cause the boom. This was a fun assignment because I just LOVE looking at maps. I could pore over old maps all day! What a great resource! Why aren't these available for smaller towns like Wall?

Archive Grid and CAMIO - take 2

Now that I can access the databases, let me tell you what I learned about Sitting Bull:

• AKA Tatanka Iyotake, Tatanka Iyotanka, Ta-Tanka-I-Yotan
• Native American shaman from the mid to late 1800s
• fought against the Crow Indians
• wounded in battle on several occasions
• opposed the encroachment of the white man
•  led Sioux and Cheyenne warriors against US soldiers of the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn
• after battle, led tribe into Canada where they lived until surrendering to the US
• after capture, toured with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show
• killed in 1890 while resisting arrest for Ghost Dancing

This artifact is held at the Cornell University Library.

I searched on Monet and got 198 entries. There were such things as letters, exhibition catalogues, bills, artist files, books in French, miscellaneous uncatalogued material, institutional files including clippings and reviews of an exhibition, and special collections of research work. The institutions included the Brooklyn Museum, MOMA New York, The University of Virginia, the Research Library of the Getty Research Institute, the National Gallery of Art, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and the Smithsonian Institute. Each entry had similar information as the Sitting Bull autograph card, there was information on the holdings and contact information for the institution. If you were doing research on a specific subject, this would be a great place to begin your search although I suspect your would need to be independently wealthy to visit all the institutions who had items of interest, could be kind of fun though!

In CAMIO my search on Paul Revere turned up many objects such as teaspoons, tea urns, sugar bowl, cream pots, a sauceboat, goblet, wine quart and Federal style tea service; in short, everything you might expect a master silversmith to make.

My Sioux search brought up 63 works including artifacts of and made by the Sioux and art done by and about the Sioux. There were beaded artifacts, like a shirt and gauntlet and doll, sculpture, jewelry, drawings, paintings, and photographs. Each entry included the what, where, dates, format, size, a good photo, and copyrights.

I searched on Nampeyo, a famous Hopi potter. There were 4 results and each included the what, where, dates, format, size, picture and copyrights.

Let me just say that these are incredible photos of the object, high resolution, very nice! I think one might be able to use this site for research and information gathering if your were looking for a specific artist. It could also be used for educational purposes or your own pleasure, but the entries I looked at were very specific that the images not be used for public purposes.

For my search I continued with the Hopi theme and selected the pots as my favorites. The slideshow is very cool, as are the comparison tools. I'm not sure what I would use the web page feature for - could you add it to your library webpage for special events or would that violate copyright issues? Pretty fun little interactive tool!

Archive Grid and CAMIO

I am having much difficulty with this particular assignment. I accessed Archive Grid via the state library website and searched on the sitting bull autograph card. I found," Sitting Bull autograph card (18_) Sitting Bull 1834?-1890 autograph card and envelope for card." This was not a link however and I could not access any more information. I tried to search on Monet and found three listings; Institutional Files, Exhibitions. for Monet's London: Artists' reflections on the Thames 1859-1914, Monet and his contemporaries, and Monet and the Mediterranean. All of these were from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Department of Painting and Sculpture. Once again, no links, just a listing of items.

As for the CAMIO part of the assignment I also accessed it via the State Library page but I couldn't get any further than the home page. I couldn't log in with either my own library card or the Wall Library card. Is there another authorization and password I am supposed to be using?

I tried both of these a couple of times with the same results - what am I doing wrong?

WorldCat

On the advanced search page for WorldCat there appears to be 30 different ways to search including: access search, accession #, 6 ways to search by author, language phrase, material type, material type phrase, musical composition, musical composition phrase, notes/comments, publisher, publisher location, standard number, ISBN, ISSN, 7 ways to search by subject, and title phrase and series title. Whew!

For the first search I typed in The Hunger Games. I got 104 results. Under item 1, there were 5042 libraries worldwide that had that item. The top library in the list was Alexander Mitchell Library. I noticed that the libraries listed seemed to be in South Dakota. The call number for the first item was PZ7.C6837 and PS 3603.04558 the Dewey classification was FIC. The author has written the sequel books Catching Fire and Mockingjay and also the 5 books in the Gregor the Overlander Series. I clicked on the subject "Survival - Juvenile Fiction" and got a lengthy list that included Catching Fire, Mockingjay, and Julie of the Wolves. Other information in the record included almost everything you could think of. There was the year, the physical description of the book, the ISBN, the genre, awards, language, series, descriptors, and even the vendor information. In short, it had everything you woud expect to see in a catalogue record and more!

In OAIster the record I chose was the "Effects of Maintenance Treatments on Asphalt, Concrete Pavement Management". (A fascinating topic if ever there was one!) It appeared to be a document prepared by the SDDOT about roads. There were two links next to access, WorldCat and SDDOT. Unfortunately, when I clicked on WorldCat a message popped up that said, "item requested cannot be found". It clarified that items were added or updated daily and I may need to try my request later although it did add that the item may have been deleted or moved. I gave it a second chance and got the same error message. Well, no problem, my item had two access links so I tried the other one from SDDOT. This one said, "Specified request cannot be executed from current applicant pool". So I suppose the mysteries of asphalt and concrete road maintenance will remain a mystery, at least to me. I was hoping for the full text of the document and assume that is what one would find under other records.

I checked many of my fellow blogger's posts and found that no one had quite gotten to the WorldCat assignment yet. It must be a busy week in libraryland.

EBSCOhost

I went to the clinic today because I've been feeling punky for about a week and a half - diagnosis - a virus. Since I was in a virus kind of mood I decided to do my search on holistic remedies for viruses. I restricted my search to ebooks and medical-type databases. The search returned 4 entries; 3 ebooks - Medically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations on Dentistry, Medicine, and Nursing; Encyclopedia of Natural Pet Care; and Supercharging Your Immunity. I also got one article from the Alternative Healthwatch Database - Toward a Unified Theory of Homeopathy and Coventional Medicine. The Dictionary of Quotations seemed of limited value in making me feel better, so I ignored that entry. The Natural pet care was interesting - might want to look at that later since I have many assorted animals, but hardly useful for helping people with viruses. Supercharge Your Immunity seemed like my best bet so I looked at that resource. It was an ebook that seemed interesting but was frankly impossible to read on screen because the type was so small. I tried a few different things but was unable to zoom in or otherwise increase the font size. Probabaly some easy solution but at this point I must say it escapes me. The book seemed like what I was looking for (the little of it that I could read). Perhaps downloading the ebook might make for more options when it comes to increasing the font size. I glanced at the article to see a different entry/format but it too had incredibly small type. The article seemed a bit more academic though.

A search on Constitution Day in ebooks netted many sources. I thought the best bets for high school students were the Illustrated Dictionary of Constitutional Concepts and AP US History. Younger students might be better served by Colonies and Revolution, a junior non-fiction ebook, which was definitely easier to read.

My advanced search of western history and Oklahoma turned up 40 results. As a side note, I couldn't find PB publisher in select a field - the only options were TX-all text, AU-author, TI-title, SU-subject, SO-source, AB-abstract, and IS-ISSN (am I looking in the wrong place?). In my search there were 23 ebooks, 11 ERIC records, and 6 from Healthsource Nursing/Academic Edition. There were reasonable results about the American West, an article about adult education in the state of Oklahoma, and many resources on Native Americans from Oklahoma. Perhaps the oddest result was an ERIC resource on Japan. I clicked on it to see why it was included and found that corporate source for the article was the Oklahoma State Department of Education, Oklahoma City. Probably a good idea to narrow your search if at all possible.

Gale Virtual Reference Library

In looking through the title list, I found an intriguing entry titled Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them. In clicking on this link, I was able to choose from a lengthy list of classic books, things like Shakespeare and the Iliad and Odyssey. I chose to read about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. This was a very long entry with many parts. The entry had the basics like what the book was, a brief synopsis, and about the author. It followed up with a longer section on events in history at the time the short story took place. It delved into such esoteric subjects as education at the time, witches, ghosts and goblins, and the Revolutionary War. Then there was a larger section exploring the story in much more detail including the events in history at the time the story was written. The article concluded with a bibliography for more information, and links to other articles from index terms found within this one. I definitely learned something about the story and especially its time period. Quite interesting, could be very useful if doing a report on one of the included stories. The listen feature also worked well.

In using the search box I decided to type in pregnancy because I had a young patron ask me today about any resources we had on pregnancy. The results from that admittedly broad topic included many pages of articles. I got everything from problems in pregnancy like stillbirth, SIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, miscarriage, drugs, etc., to contraception and Roe vs Wade. I suppose you could narrow it down, but I decided to have a look at what seemed to be more general resources. I looked at lactation in the Gale Encyclopedia of Children's Health. This resource seemed quite information dense, somewhat difficult to read for my patron of today, with no pictures and lots of big words. I probably wouldn't recommend this particular article to her. Next I tried the Gale Encyclopedia of Nursing and Allied Health on the subject of fetal development. This one had pictures, but still seemed somewhat technical with plenty of big words. It did have some links. The last one I tried was the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine on the subject of amniocentesis. This particular article seemed easier to read and had an interesting picture. Of all the ones I looked at this seemed the most approachable. I should probably explore more topics in that resource to see if they all had the same feel. The listen feature also seemed to work well in this area. It helped with saying the words which some might find daunting.

Lastly I looked around at other blogs. I had a hard time finding ones that had already done Gale. I finally found Annie's Ideas and SD Library Challenge. They both seemed to have similar experiences.  I liked SD Library Challenge's idea of listening with your eyes closed. Hadn't thought of that but it would be a great way of really listening.

ProQuest

I had no idea that this was available through the databases. The number of scholarly journals and magazines is quite amazing! I left my computer unattended during my research session because I needed to go pick up my kids from school, and when I returned my session had timed out. I got a different screen than the startup one I used through SDLN. When I tried to reaccess the database it didn't work and I had to go back to the home page for SDLN. In my trying to access adventures, I brought up a list of universities that subscribe to Proquest (many of the CA universities do) and was very impressed that we had database access equal to many of the high powered universities.

In my research, I did a search on Roman archaeology and then refined it to the archaeology of Pompeii. The results were staggering. There were many, many articles from many diverse publications, from many years. I liked the ones where the full text was included. On a couple of the ones with just a listing I tried to link to the SDSL holdings and every time I got a "server error". If you really needed those articles it would be a pain to get an error message - quite frustrating. Perhaps I was doing something wrong? However, the sheer number of sources made up for the error message - you could probably just use another source.

In accessing the publications tab, I searched for "library" and again got hundreds of results. There was everything from Current Awareness Abstracts of Library and Information Management, to Tech Library, Library Journal, and School Library Journal, and on and on and on. I delved into a couple of them to see what the listing looked like. You needed to select a year and an issue. I looked into a couple of the tech ones and was kind of overwhelmed with the level of the writing. Then I went to the School Library Journal and that was very fun! I read a neat article about ereaders. Then I read one about What Teens are Really Reading. That article had an awesome top 20 list of good series and good books that are "flying off the shelves" in libraries. Since we are looking to build our teen section it was particularly interesting to me. Very useful! I spent way longer than I had planned just cruising through the articles. Pretty fun and a fabulous resource!

To finish up I selected a couple fellow challenge bloggers to review. I picked clueless and hopeless hoping that these two were more my peers in experience. I must say that even though we had similar information in our blogs, both of theirs were much more attractively presented (with cool graphics and pictures I might add). I definitely felt out of my league in the blogosphere. Somewhere life has passed me by! I feel lucky just to get this darn thing posted correctly, never mind adding nifty pictures.

SIRS Discoverer/Issues Researcher

As directed I looked up armadillos and was impressed with the number of articles. They were spread out throughout time, not all from this year or any year particularly. I clicked on the first resource and found that it was written in British english (armoured) and had a picture with a page full of information - looked to be pretty good stuff if you were doing a report on armadillos. It was very like the World Book database including citations. The one thing I did notice in clicking on some of the subsequent articles was that there weren't very many pictures. Even in the magazine articles from places like Ranger Rick, the text was included without the pictures. I would think that this might make this resource less appealiong than World Book for younger children. The good thing was that it had so many different resources, super for older students doing reports

Under database features I selected Italy like I did in World Book so I could compare the two databases. The information was nicely organized almost like bullets, then there was a section organized by date. Pretty handy resource if you are looking for facts. I loved the graphic organizers! As for the map section, the maps seemed to be decent. They might be used to illustrate a report or clarify information.

I chose fiction fort the last area and was pleased to find stories! Fun! I also couldn't resist taking a peek at educator resources and found some potentially useful forms/ideas.

Under Issues Researcher I chose banned books. The format seems to be a short summary of the issue, pro and con statement with three supporting articles per side, there were questions for critical thinking, and additional resources with a nice research guide. Everything seemed to be updated and current. The only complaint I had was that the video didn't load properly and wouldn't play. The research tools were pretty neat, included a wealth of newspaper/magazines/graphics. The timeline was a nice touch, could help to organize information. I thought that this site provided many, varied resources that would be perfect for a mid-high school student doing a research paper. One could find enough pertinent resources/articles to do a whole paper.

The course subjects were quite comprehensive including math, science, social studies, Language arts, fine arts, and health. They appeared to be broken down into subsets that could be used to narrow focus. By selecting a subset, you were given a series of articles pertaining to the subject. I also clicked on a word in the graphic and it took me to the leading issues pages complete with pro/con.

Learning Express Library

For the first part of the lesson I chose the Praxis II test mostly because I've had experience taking that kind of test. It was incredible that this kind of resource is available for no charge. I remember buying a book, to the tune of about thirty bucks, to study for this test. This is exactly what one would need to study for a test and practice taking it as well. A very practical and welcome resource.

For the second part of the lesson I chose the course about how to create a resume because it seems a very practical and necessary thing that everyone needs. The course was very detailed and led you through the steps for making a good resume. This seems like an invaluable resource for anyone from first time resume makers to those looking to freshen up their old resume. Again, an incredible resource - great that it is available for no charge!

Lastly I looked at the ebooks about how to write great essays and also public speaking. I was surprised that they were actually full-sized books. There was tons of information in both of them and they helped to guide you through the process, which I would think would be very helpful.

This is a fabulous resource for our patrons. There is much more here than I first realized. I was surprised at the quantity of tests, ebooks, courses available.

World Book

In comparing the World Book Online Kids and World Book Online Info Finder, I was impressed with how much information was included at age appropriate levels. The Kid section had a solid and easy to read overview while the Online Info was much more detailed, had a wealth of information about many topics related to the search, and was much more specific. I also liked the included outline where you could jump to the section in which you were interested. Lots of cool pictures were included and some interesting videos made the site quite compelling. I think kids would like both of these resources and find them easy to navigate. I also appreciated how the citation for the article was included, very helpful. I can see a kid starting research and getting pulled further into the site as they explore all the available links.

As for the Online Reference Center, again I was impressed with the details and the amount of information available. The outline with links would be very helpful if one was looking for a specific area. This is very much like an encyclopedia for the digital age. If a patron was looking for solid, reliable information - this would be a good placce to send them.

1st post

I have never done this before and am trying to figure out how this all works - so lame.