Lesson 10 - Wrap Up

My biggest discovery was everything! I did the challenge so I would have a better idea of the online resources that are available to people. Whether I will actually be able to incooperate all of them into my work week remains to be seen. I do however know these resources are out there and will use them if the opportunity arises.

Thanks Julie and Jane!!

Lesson 9 -- History and Genealogy Resources—Ancestry Library, Heritage Quest and Sanborn Maps

I do not exist in Ancestry Library. There was a mix up when my mother died and our identities were basically combined. I did find my mother and her record appears to be correct. As I was searching for my mother I came across several of her family members. It was interesting to see about them as I never met many of them. By doing a keyword search on South Dakota I got 3,615,253 hits, I think I did it right but not sure. It asked for more info to more define the search, which with that many hits is understandable. I didn't find the site very easy to use, even having specific information on a person there were multiple hits that came up that I had to look through to find who I was looking for.

Lesson 8--ArchiveGrid and CAMIO

ArchiveGrid: I find it very sad that Sitting Bull was killed for following his traditions. I would have liked to have seen an image of the autograph included with the description. If there was a link to it I did not see it. For my own search I looked up Seth Bullock and came up with 8 hits. One was a diary held by the Montana Historical Society. I never knew that Seth was a Canadian or that he and President Theodore Roosevelt were good friends. It's a good resource for finding out where to look for information on a subject and that it gives you the contact information to the institution is nice. Not really suited for younger patrons, but grad students could find it useful. I realize most people would rather be able to have complete access to materials but that's not always possible.





CAMIO: I love the silver work of Paul Revere! Beautiful. Makes me want to travel to Boston to see it. When searching for "Sioux" there were 63 results, with work types ranging from paintings to sculpture to jewelry. Since I don't really have a favorite artist, I searched for a couple from SD, Jon Crane and Terry Redlin. Needless to say, I didn't get any hits on them ;). I can see art students using this site to compare one artist to another or one movement to another. I did a search on snow (since I'm watching it fall at the moment). If I was doing a paper on this topic it was easy to narrow down my results and put them together into one spot so I would be able to study them at a later date and compare them.

I'm giving CAMIO a thumbs up. It's fun to have a place to go to look at art when you live so far from art galleries. It would be nicer though if you were able to access the site from home. :)

Lesson 7 - WorldCat

I used WorldCat at my previous job when helping out with ILL. I knew there were all kinds of applications it could be used for but didn't realize how you could follow a thread from one title (Skippyjon Jones, who I love and adore) all the way to Hurricane Katrina stories. One could lose track of what it was you were researching if you're not careful (this is not always a bad thing). I'm not totally in love with the site but can see it's usefulness within the library world, although I'm not sure how it would be useful to someone who isn't associated with libraries. When searching in OAIster for South Dakota I paged through and came across several old pictures of Deadwood, Bear Butte and the surrounding areas. What I found very interesting was that all the ones I looked at were held by the Denver Public Library, not more local libraries. I guess by doing this excercise I have the knowledge to direct people here if looking for old photos, so therefore it could be helpful to others in the outside world ;)

Lesson 6 - EBooks on EbscoHost

I did several different searches on a wide variety of topics just to get a feel for the site. By using the advanced settings you can really narrow your searches. The basic search is nice if you have a topic but not sure where you specifically want to go. I am always amused when searching sites, any site, not just this one, and you can do search for dog breeds and get books on psychology. Makes me want to read that book to see how it relates to dogs :) Anyway...

I found these 3 books about the constitution. I don't remember celebrating Constitution Day as a youngster, but possible it is so far in the past I forgot.

Our Elusive Constitution : Silences, Paradoxes, Priorities
Hoffman, Daniel N.
State University of New York Press, 1997

Representing Popular Sovereignty : The Constitution in American Political Culture
Levin, Daniel Lessard
State University of New York Press, 1999

The American Republic : Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny
Brownson, Orestes Augustus
Project Gutenberg

With the Western History search I added South Dakota as it would make sense since this is where I live. I didn't find any books published in SD but did find some books about SD. I could have been searching wrong and there were some published in SD and I just missed them.

Lesson 5 - Gale Virtual Reference Library

Lots of great resource materials here. Easy to use whether you know what you want to search for or if you browse the titles list to find what you might be looking for. Within the articles you can search related topics and links, limit the search to which volume or edition to what fits your criteria. What is the best part I think is that you can email the article to yourself, or print it, listen to it, download to an MP3. How awesome is that??? And ever present is the all important citation help. Where was that when I was in school? I just did a few basic searches within different titles to see how they looked, then did a search on zinc. Thinking you might not want to have such a broad topic :) I looked through several articles on different areas of zinc and found out several interesting things that I had not known about it.

One question I do have is how often are the titles updated? Does it happen automatically if a newer edition comes out? I noticed one of the titles was from 1999. I realize many things don't change, but the Endangered Species is from 2004 and I would have to think that there are some changes there. Do you have any information on this? Thanks!!

Lesson 4 - ProQuest

I did a basic search on synthetic drugs since it seems to be a big topic in SD at the moment. There are several articles on this topic. The majority of articles look like they come from scholarly and trade journals which are great for higher education students but there didn't seem to be much for younger students. At least not that I saw from my search. I liked that you can narrow your search by article type, publication, classification, ect. One obstacle with the site is trying to explain to patrons that, no, this isn't an internet site and you can use the articles as a source.

The publications portion is great! Who knew you could look up complete journals online??? If a patron comes in and remembers some article from june of 2004 in, say newsweek, you can show them this site and they can find it quite easily. Or, if a colleague mentions a great review they read in Booklist, you can search from the comfort of your chair, not having to dig through old paper issues.

SIRS

This exercise a little difficult for me to complete and I struggled with it. The site seems like it would be quite helpful in an academic setting where the librarians are aware of such things as Lexile measures (I had not heard of them before so I spent time reading about them, which was a good exercise). When just doing a search on a broad topic the amount of articles that came up was immense. Once I figured out that people would have a more focused topic than me just picking a broad topic, it would greatly dwindle the articles. There were things I did like about the site, like being able to sort between newspaper and magazine articles. Having the citations at the bottom is helpful and also links to other articles is useful. I will continue to work with the site to get a better feel for it. The fact that I don’t care for it won’t keep me from telling people about it, it is just my opinion after all.

Learning Express Library

The Career Course: Creating a Great Resume is an incredible resource, easy to follow, step by step instructions for anyone no matter how long they have been out of the job market. The ability to have one resource to compile your information, put it into the correct format, save it and then print it out can be invaluable to people looking for a new job. Now instead of going to some random Google found resume site, I can steer people towards Learning Express Library where they can actually get some insight into the resume and what its true objective is.

I found the World Book site to be a wonderful resource. The site was easy to navigate and to find what I was looking for. I liked how the information started out simple for the younger kids, and then got more advanced in the student version. The information on how to cite the articles is a great resource also. When researching a country in the Advanced version it was nice to have the sidebars so you could go directly to the information you wanted rather than having to scroll through the entire article to find what you are looking for. Plus the fact you can have audio for pronunciation of words, and can actually have the text translated into a foreign language is terrific. With our growing population of people moving into our country this is a very helpful resource to direct people to.

Closing Thoughts

I found there to be several useful things out on the web that I didn't know existed before. I especially like RSS feeds for fast and current information on my favorite topics. YouTube is a fascinating site where you can find all sorts of videos about any topic (the cute ones with animals are my favorites). And my podcast for the mail machine was easily findable. Although I didn't feel I had enough time to get too in depth with any one area, I did get a good overview of all the topics. I can always go back and research the ones that interested me. One of things that I didn't like was having to set up all the different accounts at the different sites. Many of them I may never look at again. I've said all along that I don't like my private information out there for people to look at. They can find enough information out there without my help. I'm sure I'm like most staff and found LibraryThing to be a great site. I've always said I was going to keep a list of books I've read, now I may actually be able to do it. For the most part I did have a good time while doing the excersices, especially when the Kermies were able to get together and learn as a team.

NetLibrary

Although I didn't set up my own account I have seen the site through training at RCPL. If I had an MP3 player I would be very interested in downloading books to it. I'm still one of those that likes the BCD format. I guess that you wouldn't have to worry with the download if the CD was scratched or wouldn't work for some reason. Ah, the advancements in technology...

Podcasts

The podcast I chose was the one that I actually did for RCPL on our mail machine. I figured this is of interest to me. Podcasts are actually pretty easy to do and have good information in a short amount of time. I do have to thank my cameraman Travis for all his help (especially not getting me in any of the shots!!!)

YouTube

I LOVE Cookie Monster. I kinda like YouTube. I find that several of the videos posted will start and stop lots of times and it's really hard to watch them. I usually get annoyed and just stop watching. I have had lots of people send me links to different videos and most are pretty good. I haven't really done alot of looking on my own to see what I can find. I did search "library" and wow, there's alot of videos out there about libraries. Who'da thunk it? I do find that when I do a search on something that I tend to get off track by the other tags associated with the one I was looking at. Such as when I found this Cookie Monster/library video, there were lots of other Sesame Street videos that I found myself wanting to look at. But remembering that I was on work time stopped me from doing this. Or did it?!?!

Web 2.0 tools

I looked over several of the awarded sites and discovered most of them were sites that we have already worked with. So I went to other sites that our patrons probably wouldn't be asking about so much. Such as Acroplay, a site for games. Granted, one game I tried out only had instructions in Korean, I still was able to figure it out, sort of. From that site, you can find different game sites. Most of the sites I've noticed you can find other sites of similar topics. That's the great thing about the web, you find one site and from there you can access thousands of sites featuring the same topic. The information is limitless.

Kittycat

Okay, so here I am trying to figure out this new tool, Zoho. So far it seems as if it's alot like Word. I'll need to play more, but so far so good.

The above is a document from ZOHO. I was actually able to send it to my blog correctly. Yea for me. (I am currently editing this post as so I don't have to create a new one for the same topic) It seems as though part of the picture was cut off. I'm sure there's a way to crop that so it would fit properly. Something I will have to look into in the future. I don't personally have a use for this site currently, but that could certainly change in the near future.

wiki whati?

I can see good uses for wikis. The one set up by RCPL's Public Services is a great example. The help that they can give each other by updating information already there is a plus. If one person has posted a topic, someone else can come along and say yes, but try this too. I don't like the way Wikipedia is set up. Too much false information can get published when anyone can add to a posted topic. How can you be sure the information is truthful? People tend to believe everything they read, with this type of format lots of false information gets out. Hopefully one can distinguish between the truth and lies.

Web 2.0

In this excercise we were to read some articles about web 2.0 and blog. In the article "Away from Icebergs" the author thinks that the book collection is becoming obsolete as more people are using the web to get their information. I think this is very untrue and became agitated by his remarks. Until I saw that he works in an academic library (UNR: Go Wolves!!!). With that information it makes sense as more students are using the web to gather their resources when researching a project. In the public library arena, I don't see this happening. There's nothing better than curling up with a good book and a blankie. Curling up with a laptop just doesn't cut it. I believe the general public will always want the paper copy, something they can hold. Many schools make their students get books as research materials, not allowing them to use only the web. This is good. People shouldn't forget the humble beginnings of learning.

Technorati

This is a fairly neat site. But there are so many tags associated with with so many different sites that it's hard to weed through alot of the stuff. Some of the tags that people use I find are pretty worthless. Just my opinion. Maybe if I have more time later on I can look into it better and see what the advantages are.

Del.icio.us

I'm not sure that I think del.icio.us is all that great. I guess I prefer going out and finding my own websites rather than using someone elses. Plus, there's not that many sites that I visit that I don't know the sites offhand. I did find this site as I was looking around del.icio.us and thought if I ever got a free moment I would look at it more in depth.

http://www.life-with-confidence.com/how-to-deal-with-negative-people.html