Wrapping Up!

What was my biggest discovery?  I would have to say that my biggest discovery was that I have been under-utilizing MARVEL as a resource! However, in terms of specifics, I would say that learning about all that  Consumer Health Resources has to offer was a big discovery for me, with Learning Express coming in a close second.  I did know about Consumer Health Resources but had no idea just how extensive a resource it is, and I had not used Learning Express at all.  Hobbies and Crafts was a great find for me as well.  I did also learn new things about all the databases that I have already been using.

My plan is to let the staff at the middle school in which I work know that I have recently completed a wonderful training experience in using MARVEL, and offer staff training.  There are some teachers that I will definitely touch base with individually about specific things that I have learned.  I will also encourage teachers to bring their classes to the Media for some group training.  I had planned to teach using NoveList to a class last year, but the class did not happen after all (probably a snow day or something, and then it just couldn’t be worked in – too bad!).  So, I can try offering that up again this year too.  I will definitely  be pointing both staff and students in the direction of the MARVEL databases every chance I get.  This has been a great learning experience for me, and I am so appreciative of the opportunity to explore this resource – my thanks to all who had a part in putting this together.  My thanks also to all of the other bloggers – I have learned from others as well, and hope that we will have access to these blogs for a while so we can keep learning from each other.

Week #10, Databases and Ebooks

For the first exercise, I looked first to see what magazines are indexed and was overwhelmed with what is there!  I looked for some of the magazines that we subscribe to at our school and found them (Calliope, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Girls’ Life, to name a few).  For the second part of this exercise, I chose to use Middle Search Plus and searched “genetically modified food” – there were 135 full-text articles.  I viewed an article titled “Our Right to Know”, published in Mother Earth News in Jun/July 2012, available in HTML and PDF format  (I found the HTML easier to read).  The article was very informative.  I then viewed a second article “How to Avoid GM Food”, also published in Mother Earth News.  Useful information, right at my fingertips!

This is good timing for me for the ebook exercise.  Our Media Center is doing a class with a group of middle school students on Monday, during which we will be showing them how to access biographies of scientists online.  I can add this resource to my list!  I like that you have an option to do a keyword search or browse by category.  I clicked on Biographies/Memoirs and did a search for Albert Einstein.  This produced 19 results, among them a book titled Scientists, Mathematicians, and Inventors: Lives and Legacies: People Who Changed the World.  The tools on the right hand side of the page make it so easy to go just where you need to easily.  Using the search tool, I found the page references for Einstein and was able to go to them by typing the page number into the box at the bottom of the page and clicking on “Go”.  Nice!

I then moved on to Constitution Day, and did an advanced search for United States Constitution. I noticed that this does default to “find all my search terms”, so I changed to “Boolean/phrase”.  I had ten results.  For Middle School students, I would probably choose The Constitution of the United States of America; The United States Bill of Rights; and possibly State Constitutions of the United States.  I viewed this last book, and again found the tools on the right to be most helpful – I was able to view the constitution for the State of Maine, along with some historical information.

Lastly, I used the words “United States history west” and typed the word “Nebraska” in the Publisher box.  I found only two results, so I also tried the search with “Oklahoma” in the Publisher box.  This returned ten results, some of which sound really interesting.

I am so pleased to have had the opportunity to explore MARVEL.  I now have some idea of what I have been missing, and likely would not have discovered without this invitational.  I can ‘t wait to explore  further, and to share with others.  Thank you!

Learning Express

Well, I typed all this up on Saturday, and Monday morning, much to my chagrin, found that for whatever reason, nothing was posted!  So, here goes again – hoping I do this right this time!

After I created my account (which was very easy), I browsed through what was available through this resource – impressive!  I then proceeded to work on item # 2.  I chose Jobs and Careers, Teaching, ParaPro Assessment Preparation, Practice Exam 1.  I chose this because, even though I was not required to take this exam for my position, I was curious about the type of questions that would be included on this type of test.  I answered twenty questions and then scored the test.  It was so helpful to be able to see how you did, and the fact that you can view how you answered each question and what the correct answer is for each question is a real plus.  I have not taken a test like this for many years – I appreciated the practice, and felt that this practice test would definitely help me – and others too – prepare for the “real thing”.

For item #3, I chose Business Writing Courses, Business Writing Basics Course 2: Writing to Your Audience.  The course outline appears on the left-hand side of the page, so you are able to see at a glance what will be covered in the course.  The information is easy to read and well-orgainzed, and helpful,  with examples provided.  You are also given opportunity to practice what you have learned.  I did learn some good tips for “writing to my audience”.

For item #4, I chose to browse the library of ebooks and selected Jobs and Careers – Becoming a Nurse.  Students at our school often do career research assignments, so I thought this would be an interesting way to go.  The book I chose has 224 pages, so I browsed the table of contents to see what was included in the book.  It certainly seemed to cover the topic pretty well, with several chapters, discussing everything from nursing as a profession to education requirements to licensing and certification information.  A lot of information, and easy to read.  It was helpful to have a sidebar on the right hand side of the page (which you can turn on or off) that lists page numbers and links to them – this allows you to navigate to a particular page quickly and easily.  Whenever you have a lengthy document that you are viewing online, this is a feature that is a real plus.

Overall, I was very pleased with this resource, and will definitely be sharing with others, as well as going back for more for myself!  My thanks for including this resource in the invitational – another one I was unfamiliar with!  I sure have been learning about what I have been missing!

Ancestry, continued

Oops!  I just found the Photos and Maps section.  Off to explore!

Ancestry

I was excited about starting this assignment.  However, my excitement dimmed a bit when I learned that I would only be able to access this resource at a public library – there was no way I was going to be able to get to a public library this week.  So, I set myself up for a trial subscription to Ancestry.com and went to work.

No matter how I tried, when I searched my name I could not find me!  Disappointing.  I found records for people who had the same first and last name, and middle initial, as me, but no record for me.  So, I clicked on the Ancestry Card catalog and was at least able to find myself through a Public Records Index, vol. 1.  Now I know why I have, in the past, received offers in the mail addressed to me with a “IV” attached to the name!  Curious.  But I do exist!  I tried the link for U.S. Census records and found the 1940 census information for my father and his family.  That was cool.

Using the birth, marriage, and death search, I was able to find:  my mother and father’s record of marriage; my paternal grandfather’s record of death; a copy of my paternal grandmother’s birth record; and the marriage and death record for my paternal great – grandfather.  I have only just begun!  I have a fair amount of family history information that has been gathered over the years (on both sides of my family), but there is more we want to find, and I will put my trial subscription to good use.  Who knows – after that, I will visit the public library often if necessary. 

I could not find a link for Photos and Maps. 

Consumer Health Resources

I found this to be a very informative exercise!  Using Health Source, I clicked on the publications link and found that there is a wide variety of types of sources available, including pamphlets, periodicals, books, databases, academic journals.  I think it is helpful to be able to sort the publications list by subject and description as well as alphabetically.  I found Prevention magazine in the list, which is a publication that I enjoy.  I chose to research diabetes, and found an article titled “We Beat Diabetes  – With Food” (from Prevention magazine), and found it to be very readable.  I then chose another article, and only read a small portion – it was a very technical article and I would need to consult a medical dictionary for sure to even begin to understand this one!  While exploring the list of articles retrieved, however, I was pleased to find that there were results for medication information. All in all, a helpful resource.

Medline Plus appears to be an awesome resource!  The main page is pretty amazing, with links for Health Topics, Drugs and Supplements, and Videos and Cool Tools.  I like that there is access to a medical dictionary right on the main page!  In the news column on the right side, I found an article about head injury and pesticides connection to Parkinsons’ Disease; one about migraine-associated brain changes; and one about US preterm birth rate.  Some of the top searches listed were amlodipine, autism, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, hypothyroidism.  I searched for the drug combination lisinopril/hydrochlorothiazide, which is prescribed for high blood pressure, and found: why it is prescribed; how to use; special precautions; dietary instructions, side effects, what to do in case of emergency/overdose.  When I did a search for diabetes in Medline Plus, my results page had links for specific categories related to the disease (ie., diabetes and pregnancy; diabetes complications; diabetic diet, etc.).  I clicked on the link for diabetic diet and found a page with a wealth of resources, including Basic Information, a box where you can sign up for updates by e-mail, an interactive tutorial for diabetes meal planning, a link for Patient Handouts – this is only a sampling of what was on this page – wow!  I don’t really know how to answer the question about how the information in Medline differs from that in Health Source, other than to say that you can probably find much of the same info in both places, but the way in which you find it or search for it is different, and it is presented in a different interface.  Also, I do not believe there was any access to videos in Health Source. I tried to watch a video, but unfortunately did not have the necessary software on my home computer to play an anatomy video, so I tried for a surgery video and could not get that to work either. I will try both again when I am at school, because I found videos in both lists that I would like to take a look at.  This will be really cool to share with our health teacher at school.  I will be sharing both resources, Health Source and Medline Plus, with this teacher, as I think that both would prove to be very helpful for the students.  I want to make sure that our school nurse knows about them too, although I would think that she already knows about Medline Plus.  I have found two more resources that I will be going back to often – I know that I have only scratched the surface! 

Business Resources

I have to confess that this assignment did not excite me as the previous two did.  I did, however, give it a shot and feel as though I have come away with some new learning.
Using Business Source Complete, I searched for fm radio, and retrieved 3,970 results with a simple search.  I then narrowed the search by choosing full text and limiting the dates of publication to 1998 t0 2012 – this search produced 2, 202 results.  I noticed that the results list contained items that were reports, or articles from academic journals and periodicals.  However, on the left of the page, you have an option to choose from a list of source types – academic journals, trade publications, magazines, newspapers, market research reports.  For someone who knows what they are looking at, or looking for, these limiters would be extremely helpful.

Regarding the visual search option, I think that in some ways it makes searching easier and in some ways harder.  I like how it groups the results by subject, and you can scroll through the results easily.  You can limit your search to full-text articles and filter by date.  However, I did not see a way to choose source types here.

EconLit is another resource that I can see being useful to a someone who knows business – which I do not, but I gave it a try.  Doing a search for small business produced 1, 587 results.  I found it helpful that, when you start typing the text for small business,  other suggestions come up (as they do when you are doing searches using other search engines). I continued this exercise by limiting my results to full-text articles only, and to dates of publication between 2008-2012  and came up with 467 results.  Noticing that I was getting results that had to do with business in other countries, I included “United States” as part of my search criteria and limited my results to 77.

I did not find many results for small business and EPA, and my search for small business and tax policy produced only 1 full-text article, again with the publication dates of 2008 – 2012.

Using Regional Business News, I searched for Pepsico, and retrieved 1, 162 results.  By searching all source types, I noticed that the first results listed were all newspaper articles.  I limited the search by source to trade publications and radio and TV transcripts and reduced my results to 100 – the first page in this results list included a quarterly earnings report.

Searching Pepsico and Maine produced one result, an article about an event involving the company that was held in Portland, Maine.

A search for LLBean produced 7 results, mostly news articles.

Although I don’t understand much of what I was looking at, I did find the Value Line Investment Survey exercise interesting.  After reading the Description, I did look at the various reports offered – Ratings and Reports, you can search for information by company or by industry, and the Selection and Opinion seemed to give good general economic information.  It was fun to search for companies and find the report of stock performance over a period of time – again, I had no clue what I was looking at, but found it interesting.  I don’t know if it was something I did wrong (most likely), but did not see any tabs at the top of the page I could click on, and could not see where I would look for a “full research report”.   I do intend to do more exploring with this resource.

Wall Street Journal was interesting too.  I searched for small business and health care and found, sorted by date, a total of 19, 581 results, which I quickly limited by date (January 2011 – November 2012), which gave me 3,159 results.  Of the suggested limiters, I would think a small business person might be interested in “health insurance and small business”,  “health insurance and health care expenditures”, “health insurance and employee benefits”.

Although much of what I found in this assignment is very Greek to me, I feel as though I could at least help to direct someone to a resource that might be helpful to them.  Since I work in a middle school, I do not expect that I will have much need to to that, but you never know what information a student might come to the library looking for.  I can say that I do want to explore both Value Line and the Wall Street Journal a little more.  That is for another day though!

I love NoveList!

I have used NoveList in the past, so was waiting patiently for this assignment and a chance to further explore this database!  Since I work in a middle school library, I have often had a need to use this resource to help me meet the reading wants and needs of the students.  I really like the series feature.  Another blogger posted that series are very popular with students right now, and I agree.  When a student reads that first book in a series, and is hooked, well, we better be ready to keep them going!  One of the beauties of using the series search is that if you don’t know the name of the series, you can find the series by typing in the title of a book.  I was even successful in finding this when I did not know the exact title of the book, a plus when you are working with any patron, especially kids.

As for the views available in the results list, I guess I would say that the “detailed” view would be most useful in connecting a reader with a book, as most readers that I know (myself included) want to know what the book is about.  I agree with what another blogger wrote about the “brief” view being good to use if all you need to do is print out a list for the patron so they know the book order.  I think the “grid” view is kind of fun too – people do like to see the cover!

The Read Alikes feature is just amazing!  It is a real challenge sometimes when you have a reader who has read all the books by their favorite author and is looking for something new.  I like this feature for myself and have used it in the past.  Having several suggestions for different authors is a real plus.  This feature is so easy to use too – thanks for the tip about hovering over the magnifying glass to get a pop up box.  The reader can see a brief description of the type of book the author writes, and know at a glance if they want to explore that author further or not.  As another blogger wrote, it helps to fine tune the aspects of another author’s style to the style of their favorite author – well said! The reader also gets a suggestion about what book to read first.  Will this help make my job easier?  Well, let’s just say I had the opportunity to show it to one student this week who consistently comes in to the library and asks “Do you have any new books?”  This student is an avid reader, and so far I have been able to keep up with her, but it is getting more and more difficult.  She was thrilled!  I also spent some time this week searching for more titles for her, and came up with some titles that I will suggest to her.  I was able to save the titles to a folder and print out the results.   Then there is the other side of this coin – the reluctant reader.  Yes, I can see the possibilities for the usefulness of Read Alikes as being endless.

I can see where NoveList would be very useful in maintaining a collection that will meet the needs of your library patrons.  For one thing, it allows you to keep up with the books in a series, so you can be sure to have them and not have gaps.  You can also use the author Read Alikes feature to add new authors to your collection based on their similarities to the authors that are popular with your patrons.  Keeping your collection up to date, and helping your patrons find books that they will enjoy, is so rewarding, and is what we are here for!  I can’t wait to share this resource with the staff and students at our school.

I really enjoy reading the other blogs that have been posted.  There is so much to learn here, and I have benefited by what other learners have shared.

 

 

 

Hobbies and Crafts

After watching the short tutorial about the Hobbies and Crafts database, I started exploring.  Wow!  Pick one??  After bouncing around a bit (felt like a kid in a candy store!) I finally settled on macrame, a subcategory under the Needlecrafts and Textiles subject.  I have had an interest in macrame for many years, so this seemed to be a good place to land.  My library does not happen to subscribe to any of the resources listed, but no matter,  because the projects tab did  provide me with some ideas for beaded and knotted bracelets, and I am hoping to be able to make some for Christmas gifts.  What good timing!  I also found an interesting project for a macrame purse.  I plan to go back and check out some of the other options (reference books, etc.).

In one of my many side trips, to the Home and Leisure subject, I checked out the Cooking subcategory and found that Cooking Light magazine is one of the magazines listed in the results.  This magazine is one that I have used in the past, and is available at my local library.

When I used the Help feature, I learned that you can search by Publication name.  I can see where that could be useful – for example, newspapers often feature stories (outdoor leisure activities, recipes, etc.) that a person might remember seeing and want to find again.  I also found the Hobbies and Crafts tutorial video that is provided by EBSCO (thanks to a post by another blogger!) so I watched that and it had some helpful tips too.

I am loving this assignment!  I have looked briefly at the Hobbies and Crafts database before, but never taken the time to really explore it .  So glad I have now, and will be using often.  Can’t wait to share.

Speaking of sharing, I am enjoying reading other blogs, and learning what other people are discovering in their explorations.  However, I am still having trouble posting comments – does not seem to be a problem as long as I am posting to a blogger who is using WordPress, as I am, but I can’t seem to post a comment to a blog set up in Blogspot.  Any suggestions?

Newspapers and Maine Newsstand

I found the short tutorial about using Proquest, Maine Newsstand, Maine Memory and Windows on Maine very helpful,  particularly the segment on how to use the features on the results page.  Can’t wait to explore!  The tutorial would be very useful for staff training in the school I work in (I am hoping to do one once I have completed this invitational).  I wonder if we could get permission to use these tutorials?  I also like that both Maine Memory and Windows on Maine are available through Marvel – we provide links to both of these databases on our Media Center webpage, but the more ways people are able to locate these great resources, the better!

On to exploring!  Using Maine Newsstand, I searched for full text articles about Angus King (seem timely to me!).  The initial search retrieved 14, 879 results.  Using the features on the right hand side of the page, I first sorted the results by publication date (most recent first), and tried limiting the results by using “document type”, “subject”, and “publication date”.  Searching “document type – news” with a publication date range of 2011 – 2012 narrowed my results to 1, 030 – much more manageable than 14, 879!  Searching by “subject – candidates” and limiting the publication date range to 2011-2012 resulted in 93 articles.  I will be able to go back to this search to explore some more since I was successful in saving the search results.  Unfortunately, when I tried to create an alert, I got an error message (server error).  I have noticed, in reading other posts, that I am not the only person who has had this issue.

I have enjoyed reading what other people have found in their travels, and have (I think) successfully commented on one.  However, when I tried to comment on another today, I had difficulty – something to do with my profile.  I was directed to log in to my account, but still had trouble.  It seems as though it might have something to do with trying to post to blogs that are created using a different provider than the one I am using, but I am not sure of that.

Finally, one of my successes in showing what Marvel can do involves the Literacy Specialist with whom I work.  She was new to our school last year, having moved to Maine from another state.  Last year, I introduced her to Marvel, showed her what was available through Britannica Online, and she now uses it regularly to help the students she works with.  This year, she requested some help with which databases to use to help her find articles for her students that are written at lower Lexile levels.  It is so nice that we have access to databases that will help search for information using reading level.  She and I have talked about this invitational, and she agrees that the information learned should be shared with our staff through some sort of training.  She is sold – as am I!