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.