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...