First of all I would like to thank Jane Healy and Julie Erickson for putting together a fabulous set of discovery lessons for all of us to plow through! Great job ladies!
I think the most fun I had was with CAMIO, which I freely admit I had never used before and probably wouldn't have used if it wasn't for this challenge. I don't know how often I will use it in the future, just because I don't usually have to find the kinds of things it offers, but I like knowing it's there.
Since, I work for the State Library it's kinda my job to help promote our resources. :) Now that I know so much more about them I will be able to chat them up much better when doing site visits and even when I'm at the reference desk (not that anyone usually comes in on my rare shifts up there). I also hope to continually wow the rest of the DOE by whipping out my knowledge of these resources when the opportune moment presents itself.
On a side note, just last week I had a colleague from Oklahoma send out a message over a listserv asking other State Library Children & Youth Consultants what e-resources we provided for children and teens. She had not been keeping up with that over the last couple years and I believe was going to pursue that now. Judging from the few responses I saw that were sent to the entire listserv, I think we have one of the best and most comprehensive collections for this age group. So we should take great pride in that...but we shouldn't let it go to our heads!
Monday, August 30, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
History and Genealogy Resources
Ancestry Library
1. Searching for myself with my married name turned nada so I tried my maiden name in the Birth, Marriage, and Death Index. I input my year of birth, country, and state. Got a big fat nothing of results for me but I did find the obituary listing for my paternal grandmother.
2. I have found stuff for both sets of my grandparents before using Ancestry Library. My paternal grandfather is in the 1930 census and I found lots of stuff for his parents in the two previous censuses. He was also listed in the SSDI and the Obituary listings. For the fun of it, I also searched for my maternal great-great-grandmother because I know her family names pretty well (and I've searched for them before). I found the marriage record for her, Olive M. Stiffler and my great-great-grandfather Merrill H. Totten. They were married January 15, 1910.
3. That's a lot of year books! It's intriguing to know that someone has digitized these and put them in a searchable database. The LOC image collection was also interesting. The pictures of the Corn Palace with the swastika always creeps me out though. (I know when it was on the Corn Palace it wasn't associated with the Nazis yet, but they ruined it.) The pictures I liked the best were those of the interior of the S.S. Dakota.
Heritage Quest
4. I tried searching for anything about the town I am originally from - Anderson, Indiana - and once again, came up with nothing useful. Those closest thing was a family history of people from Muncie, Indiana, which is where I was actually born, but I don't know the family the book is about. Knowing I would get a gajillion hits for New Orleans, I did it anyway because I wanted, well anything.... I actually found a book called The Epidemic Summer listing the names of people who died in May - November 1853 from yellow fever. And for those of you who don't include the months of May, September, October, or November in their definition of summer - try spending those months in New Orleans, they count as summer believe me! :) There was a whole lot more but this was pretty neat. Okay, so it is morbid but it was different.
Sanborn Maps
5. I tried searching for the location of the house that my husband and I will soon be buying, or at the very least I wanted to find the street it is located on. So I went to Pierre and chose the most recent map, which was May 1941. Batting 0 for 3 on my first searches...Apparently Pierce Street wasn't around until sometime after 1941. I know the house was build in 1967 but I thought maybe it would have been there anyway. Oh well. I did find the house I used to live on S. Taylor though. I guess that's something.
1. Searching for myself with my married name turned nada so I tried my maiden name in the Birth, Marriage, and Death Index. I input my year of birth, country, and state. Got a big fat nothing of results for me but I did find the obituary listing for my paternal grandmother.
2. I have found stuff for both sets of my grandparents before using Ancestry Library. My paternal grandfather is in the 1930 census and I found lots of stuff for his parents in the two previous censuses. He was also listed in the SSDI and the Obituary listings. For the fun of it, I also searched for my maternal great-great-grandmother because I know her family names pretty well (and I've searched for them before). I found the marriage record for her, Olive M. Stiffler and my great-great-grandfather Merrill H. Totten. They were married January 15, 1910.
3. That's a lot of year books! It's intriguing to know that someone has digitized these and put them in a searchable database. The LOC image collection was also interesting. The pictures of the Corn Palace with the swastika always creeps me out though. (I know when it was on the Corn Palace it wasn't associated with the Nazis yet, but they ruined it.) The pictures I liked the best were those of the interior of the S.S. Dakota.
Heritage Quest
4. I tried searching for anything about the town I am originally from - Anderson, Indiana - and once again, came up with nothing useful. Those closest thing was a family history of people from Muncie, Indiana, which is where I was actually born, but I don't know the family the book is about. Knowing I would get a gajillion hits for New Orleans, I did it anyway because I wanted, well anything.... I actually found a book called The Epidemic Summer listing the names of people who died in May - November 1853 from yellow fever. And for those of you who don't include the months of May, September, October, or November in their definition of summer - try spending those months in New Orleans, they count as summer believe me! :) There was a whole lot more but this was pretty neat. Okay, so it is morbid but it was different.
Sanborn Maps
5. I tried searching for the location of the house that my husband and I will soon be buying, or at the very least I wanted to find the street it is located on. So I went to Pierre and chose the most recent map, which was May 1941. Batting 0 for 3 on my first searches...Apparently Pierce Street wasn't around until sometime after 1941. I know the house was build in 1967 but I thought maybe it would have been there anyway. Oh well. I did find the house I used to live on S. Taylor though. I guess that's something.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Learning Express Library
Reading Skills Diagnostic 2: Literary Text, College Level
Dang, this was a really looooooong test. I don't remember the last test I took in Learning Express taking that long. I got 37 out of 40 possible points, and if I were in class I think I'd argue that some of my wrong answers were just as valid. But it is nice to have the explanations of why they say the answers are right, even if you did choose the correct one - in case you were guessing or unsure of your answer. I can see how this would be very helpful, and getting explanations about answers from a computer can be much easier to deal with than a snotty English professor :)
Succeeding on the Job
Okay so humorous/snarky comments first...This is part of the course description "You will also learn how to know whether you are ready for a raise or promotion, as well as the most professional way to ask for one." Obviously these folks don't work for state government where raises are entirely out of our hands.
This was actually a helpful little tutorial. The first part of each section has the hints, tips, and tricks, then you answer some questions about yourself, and the behind-the-scenes stuff gives you some personalized feedback. The tutorial is self-paced, and you can save the work to come back later if you need to.
Dang, this was a really looooooong test. I don't remember the last test I took in Learning Express taking that long. I got 37 out of 40 possible points, and if I were in class I think I'd argue that some of my wrong answers were just as valid. But it is nice to have the explanations of why they say the answers are right, even if you did choose the correct one - in case you were guessing or unsure of your answer. I can see how this would be very helpful, and getting explanations about answers from a computer can be much easier to deal with than a snotty English professor :)
Succeeding on the Job
Okay so humorous/snarky comments first...This is part of the course description "You will also learn how to know whether you are ready for a raise or promotion, as well as the most professional way to ask for one." Obviously these folks don't work for state government where raises are entirely out of our hands.
This was actually a helpful little tutorial. The first part of each section has the hints, tips, and tricks, then you answer some questions about yourself, and the behind-the-scenes stuff gives you some personalized feedback. The tutorial is self-paced, and you can save the work to come back later if you need to.
Ebook: 501 Vocabulary Questions
Okay, I may be the biggest English nerd in the whole world, but I could actually have a lot of fun with this book. I was the girl who was given a new Merriam-Webster dictionary at her wedding shower and got really exited about it! Each section has vocabulary words, questions to help you put them in context, and then the answers so you can check to see how you did. I like it!
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
CAMIO
1. Paul Revere - Maybe my history is a little fuzzy or I never learned this about Paul Revere: he's a wonderful silversmith! From tea urns, to salvers, to sugar baskets - what beautiful creations! There was also a hand-painted engraving that looks like it was probably used in a propaganda campaign against the British. Did I miss this part in history class?
2. Sioux - The first result at the top of page 1 was a scalp shirt. There's one of these in the art gallery at Red Cloud School. I know they aren't made of scalps and the hair on them is donated by friends and family...but I still find it kinda creepy. There are lots of artifacts in the results - a lot items with bead and leather work. Most of the items come from the Detroit Institute of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Interesting that there are no cultural or art institutions from South Dakota listed. I think maybe the Cultural Heritage Center needs to get on this.
3. I don't know if I have a favorite artist so I chose to search for works by Edgar Degas. I have always loved his ballerinas. My hope was to see what all was at the Art Institute of Chicago but after sorting by museum I couldn't find anything. To double check I did searches for Monet and Mary Cassatt, and I know the AIC has items from both artists, but still found nothing. So to triple check I went to the list of museums and collections that have contributed to CAMIO and guess what...no AIC! I'm going there later this month and I guess I'll just have to muddle through. Actually I plan to spend a good deal of my time walking through my favorite part of their collection - the Arms and Armor collection!
4. It's great to be able to have access to good photographs of so many works of art and artifacts. I especially like the idea of being able to access what I think of as "niche" collections - like the Lakota beading and leather work. And what a way to enhance a paper or project on a historical figure like Paul Revere than to show something else he did, besides riding a horse in the dark! I think it's almost more interesting to use the "Browse" feature, personally. I found some very cool things that way.
5. If I hadn't played around with the Browse options, I wouldn't have realized that things like purses and jewelry were in CAMIO. So I did a search for purses. One of the results I chose was a purse mount. I have no idea what that is because it doesn't look remotely like a purse, nor can I tell how it relates to purses. But it was cool looking and old. If I wanted to I could move the images around to put them in an order of oldest to newest or which ones were in the best shape. I'm sorry but I didn't create a web page. The thought of creating web pages that then float around in the Internet cloud forever more just bothers me. But I can see how doing this to go back to my search results would be handy.
2. Sioux - The first result at the top of page 1 was a scalp shirt. There's one of these in the art gallery at Red Cloud School. I know they aren't made of scalps and the hair on them is donated by friends and family...but I still find it kinda creepy. There are lots of artifacts in the results - a lot items with bead and leather work. Most of the items come from the Detroit Institute of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Interesting that there are no cultural or art institutions from South Dakota listed. I think maybe the Cultural Heritage Center needs to get on this.
3. I don't know if I have a favorite artist so I chose to search for works by Edgar Degas. I have always loved his ballerinas. My hope was to see what all was at the Art Institute of Chicago but after sorting by museum I couldn't find anything. To double check I did searches for Monet and Mary Cassatt, and I know the AIC has items from both artists, but still found nothing. So to triple check I went to the list of museums and collections that have contributed to CAMIO and guess what...no AIC! I'm going there later this month and I guess I'll just have to muddle through. Actually I plan to spend a good deal of my time walking through my favorite part of their collection - the Arms and Armor collection!
4. It's great to be able to have access to good photographs of so many works of art and artifacts. I especially like the idea of being able to access what I think of as "niche" collections - like the Lakota beading and leather work. And what a way to enhance a paper or project on a historical figure like Paul Revere than to show something else he did, besides riding a horse in the dark! I think it's almost more interesting to use the "Browse" feature, personally. I found some very cool things that way.
5. If I hadn't played around with the Browse options, I wouldn't have realized that things like purses and jewelry were in CAMIO. So I did a search for purses. One of the results I chose was a purse mount. I have no idea what that is because it doesn't look remotely like a purse, nor can I tell how it relates to purses. But it was cool looking and old. If I wanted to I could move the images around to put them in an order of oldest to newest or which ones were in the best shape. I'm sorry but I didn't create a web page. The thought of creating web pages that then float around in the Internet cloud forever more just bothers me. But I can see how doing this to go back to my search results would be handy.
Archive Grid
Doing the first search as instructed, I learned that whoever wrote the "Notes & Summaries" has a very limited view of Sitting Bull's life. The word "Sioux" was used instead of "Lakota," "Hunkpapa" was misspelled, the article makes it sound like he was the only leader at Little Big Horn (Crazy Horse & Gall were also major leaders of that battle), and the events surrounding his death were very inaccurate. I expected more from Cornell. So really, I didn't learn anything from this entry in particular.
Ansel Adams has been in the news lately due to the surfacing of some glass plate photos a man bought at a garage sale years ago. It hasn't yet been determined if they really were taken by Adams (last I heard) but they are still really cool photographs. So that's who I did my search on. There were 377 results which mostly seem to be bits and pieces of things he wrote, primarily correspondence. The gentleman who bought these photos should delve into this correspondence if he really wants to prove that the photos were taken by Adams - which he does because if they are Adams' work, they could be worth a pretty penny. One entry was actually for poetry written by Adams. I had no idea he wrote poetry. I wonder if it's any good...I'd had to go to Utah to figure that out though. Holdings were generally archives (both private and state) museums, the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress.
Ansel Adams has been in the news lately due to the surfacing of some glass plate photos a man bought at a garage sale years ago. It hasn't yet been determined if they really were taken by Adams (last I heard) but they are still really cool photographs. So that's who I did my search on. There were 377 results which mostly seem to be bits and pieces of things he wrote, primarily correspondence. The gentleman who bought these photos should delve into this correspondence if he really wants to prove that the photos were taken by Adams - which he does because if they are Adams' work, they could be worth a pretty penny. One entry was actually for poetry written by Adams. I had no idea he wrote poetry. I wonder if it's any good...I'd had to go to Utah to figure that out though. Holdings were generally archives (both private and state) museums, the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
WorldCat, part Deux - OAIster
Since WorldCat pronounces OAIster like "oyster" I decided to use the LSU spelling of the French word "two" - as many vowels as possible with an "x" thrown on the end for good measure.
After following all the directions given in the lesson I ended up with 145 possible results. Since my husband is a hunter I thought I would click on the article entitled "Factors affecting road mortality of whitetailed deer in eastern South Dakota," because the more deer that get hit means the fewer there are to hunt. After clicking on the "Access" link, it took me to a digital commons site for the University of Nebraska Lincoln, which puzzled me a bit since this was a report on eastern South Dakota not Nebraska. Oh well. At first I thought only the abstract was available, but eventually I noticed a box on the side that said "Download." This did give me the entire PDF of the document, but that box wasn't immediately obvious as it was off to the side. However, that's UNL's issue not OAIster's.
My overall impression of OAIster is favorable compared to other databases, like ProQuest or EBSCO. I wouldn't necessarily say it's any easier to use, but it's not any harder to use. OAIster offers many of the same tools as they do - emailing the article, printing it, exporting it. The only thing I didn't see was a tool about source citing, but it caters to a different clientele.
As a side note, this picture was on the same page as the information about the article...it's rather humorous!
After following all the directions given in the lesson I ended up with 145 possible results. Since my husband is a hunter I thought I would click on the article entitled "Factors affecting road mortality of whitetailed deer in eastern South Dakota," because the more deer that get hit means the fewer there are to hunt. After clicking on the "Access" link, it took me to a digital commons site for the University of Nebraska Lincoln, which puzzled me a bit since this was a report on eastern South Dakota not Nebraska. Oh well. At first I thought only the abstract was available, but eventually I noticed a box on the side that said "Download." This did give me the entire PDF of the document, but that box wasn't immediately obvious as it was off to the side. However, that's UNL's issue not OAIster's.
My overall impression of OAIster is favorable compared to other databases, like ProQuest or EBSCO. I wouldn't necessarily say it's any easier to use, but it's not any harder to use. OAIster offers many of the same tools as they do - emailing the article, printing it, exporting it. The only thing I didn't see was a tool about source citing, but it caters to a different clientele.
As a side note, this picture was on the same page as the information about the article...it's rather humorous!
WorldCat, part Uno
Title search - Well the book I'm currently reading (The Not-So-Great Depression) yielded no results so I tried one of the last ones I read - Ninth Ward. Only 40 libraries have this book world wide. This actually didn't surprise me much because it's a fairly new, fits into a somewhat niche collection of middle grade fiction. The Alameda County Library in California was the top library in the list. The call number for this is pretty easy because it's fiction. The Alameda County Library has it listed as "J RHODES,J" because of author name and the juvenile fiction classification of the title.
Since it wasn't clear if we were supposed to see what else was available for that subject from WorldCat or the top listed library of that title, I did both, but only for one subject descriptor: Hurricane Katrina, 2005 --Juvenile Fiction. The Alameda County Library had 4 total titles for with the same subject descriptor, one being Ninth Ward. There were 22 titles in WorldCat with the same subject heading. Some of the titles in WorldCat were a little hokey (in my opinion), such as Jake and Friends Encounter Hurricane Katrina. I'm sorry, this makes it sound like they took a little road trip somewhere and happened upon a hurricane. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Maybe I'm judging a book by its title, but someone at that publishing company should have raised a little flag about that.
I have always liked using WorldCat and I think it is a very good interface - very user friendly and intuitive.
Since it wasn't clear if we were supposed to see what else was available for that subject from WorldCat or the top listed library of that title, I did both, but only for one subject descriptor: Hurricane Katrina, 2005 --Juvenile Fiction. The Alameda County Library had 4 total titles for with the same subject descriptor, one being Ninth Ward. There were 22 titles in WorldCat with the same subject heading. Some of the titles in WorldCat were a little hokey (in my opinion), such as Jake and Friends Encounter Hurricane Katrina. I'm sorry, this makes it sound like they took a little road trip somewhere and happened upon a hurricane. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Maybe I'm judging a book by its title, but someone at that publishing company should have raised a little flag about that.
I have always liked using WorldCat and I think it is a very good interface - very user friendly and intuitive.
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