Net Library

1. I did a search for "travel." My results included a title on Lewis & Clark, an etiquette book to use when traveling in Africa and the Middle East, a book on how to travel alone and not be lonely, and a slew of title on weekend excursions in the country (as opposed to big cities) of pretty much every state in the U.S. I assume every state has one of those books because I readily admit that I did not look through the entire list of titles and count to 50. The only title that I raised my eyebrows a little at was a guide to "e-travel," which was about how to find great deals on vacations online. The title was published in 2000 and I know that a lot has changed since then. It makes me wonder what Net Library's weeding policy is or if they have one. Certainly e-books have a longer "shelf" life than standard print because they are useful for researchers and in theory more accessible, but if this title were on my public library shelves physically I would weed it. I do like the related topics feature on the right side of the page.

2. Not knowing what "more material" means, what materials they already have, or what age group my "students" are, I'm going to recommend some books to my high school seniors that expand on the Constitution and delve into political interpretations. In no particular order, here is my list.

Our Elusive Constitution: Silences, Paradoxes, Priorities
SUNY Series in American Constitutionalism

by Hoffman, Daniel N.
Publication: Albany State University of New York Press, 1997.

Representing Popular Sovereignty: The Constitution in American Political Culture
SUNY Series in American Constitutionalism

by Levin, Daniel Lessard.
Publication: Albany State University of New York Press, 1999.

A Companion to the United States Constitution and Its Amendments

by Vile, John R.
Publication: Westport, Conn. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.

3. As suggested, I searched for "Nebraska" in the publisher field. Results yielded titles with subjects that I expected to see, such as Lewis & Clark, various Native American leaders, places where history was written like Fort Laramie and Wounded Knee. Some surprises (pleasant ones, I might add) were titles such as: The American Indian Integration of Baseball, The Hoe and the Horse On the Plains: A Study of Cultural Development Among North American Indians, and Assimilation's Agent: My Life As a Superintendent in the Indian Boarding School System. I did not go through all 6 pages of results but from what I could tell most of the titles were published by Lincoln University of Nebraska Press. For the heck of it, I clicked on a few of the "related topics" ideas but didn't find anything as useful or pertinent as my original search.

Gale Virtual Reference Library

Just clicking around...
I'm something of a modern day hippy and decided to click into "Endangered Species" under the Environment section. This particular title has three volumes. Professionally I'm not sure how I would use this, because even though libraries have been drastically reducing staff numbers over the last year or so, I'm not sure we qualify as an endangered species. However, I did read an article this morning on CNN.com about giant catfish that could face extinction if the Mekong River is dammed as a power source. It seems that its habitat has been threatened in 2003 due to slated dynamited navigation channel improvements. Other than the standard habitat and life cycle information about the giant catfish, I learned that there are villagers in Northern Thailand who believe that catfish are sacred. Now they must be crazy because catfish are the most ugly fish I have every encountered in my life. I appreciated reading more about the giant catfish and I hope that there doesn't have to be an updated entry on them because they are even more endangered.

Basically Searching...
Since I don't know what foods have zinc in them, I thought I might start with searching for answers to that question. My search resulted in one useful article that told me that the best food to find zinc in are "lamb, beef, leafy grains, root vegetables such as potatoes and carrots, shellfish, and organ meats such as liver or kidneys."*

I then looked up an article on Hindu gods because while wracking my brain for a question, I realized I could remember how to spell Shiva (random, I know). The article I found told me all about Devi, the wife of Shiva. Devi has numerous other names and incarnations including Kali, which was familiar from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I tried the Read Speaker feature for this article....when it came to the pronunciations in parentheses I had to laugh. Half of the time the reader pronounced them differently than in the main article or spelled out part of the pronunciation. So I wouldn't say that was entirely helpful, but I wasn't expecting perfection.


*Brody, Tom, and Samuel Uretsky. "Minerals." The Gale Encyclopedia of Children's Health: Infancy through Adolescence. Ed. Kristine Krapp and Jeffrey Wilson. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 2006. 1186-1188. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 28 July 2010.

ProQuest

My husband and I are in the process of purchasing our first house. So my first search was for "home ownership." I checked the "full text documents only" box to narrow my results. I was hoping for a few articles about tips about what kinds of inspections to have done, hidden costs to watch out for, etc. With the current state of our economy and the concurrent housing crisis, I should have known I wouldn't get anything useful. After 10 pages of nothing that I was looking for, I decided there wouldn't be much to blog about.

My next search was for "adolescent brain." This yielded much better results (in terms of usefulness). I just love everything about ProQuest: how it helps me expand or narrow my search (Suggested Topics About), how I can take my search results and save them for later by emailing them, the citation builder, etc. Though I've never used it, I appreciate the RSS feed and Alert features. I find ProQuest easy to navigate and well laid out. I've also used the Advanced search many times to look for book reviews. A shout out goes to Jean Peterson in Tech Services for showing me how to do that my second day on the job!

I've used the Publications tab many times to search for a specific article I've seen in a print version of a magazine. For the heck of it I tracked down the issue of American Libraries that came out right before the 2006 annual conference in New Orleans. My mom wrote a French Quarter restaurant guide for that issue and I always enjoy reading it. Maybe that's cheating, but I don't care :)

SIRS Issue Researcher

Leading Issues - "Drilling for Oil" caught my eye. My parents live in New Orleans, went through Katrina, and are now dealing with more crap from the BP fiasco. I went down to visit them last month and we drove out to where "land" ends and the marshes begin. We saw a group of people loading boom onto a fishing boat (pictures at the bottom). But I digress...

What I liked best about all the information and options under the topic was the fact that if a PDF of an article isn't available, SIRS has still provided a color copy of any accompanying graph, charts, or tables. I was also intrigued by the fact that they give a file size for each article. My computer doesn't play nicely with Quicktime so I didn't get to listen to the Audio MP3 of the article - bummer! The Timeline feature under Research Tools was very in depth. One of the features of Issue Researcher I find the most helpful is the Pro/Con box with pre-selected articles for both sides.

Curriculum Pathfinders - I chose Language Arts and what I liked right away was the tag cloud of possible/popular research topics. The Lord of the Flies interactive game was...different....I also like the list of related subject terms linked to each article description. Most of the articles were at a fairly high Lexile level.

All in all, I liked the experience of exploring Issues Researcher better than yesterday's experience of Discoverer.

SIRS Discoverer

1. Armadillos - Personally I'd like to know if was Jane or Julie who decided on armadillos :) I've actually been about 2 feet away from an armadillo once. They're kinda cute!

But on with the lesson...First of all I have to say that some of the article titles made me laugh: "Hard Body," "Boinngg! Here Come the Armadillos," and "Real Animals or Magic?" are among my favorites. It was nice that in the search results list articles with photographs had the little camera icon and the Lexile level listed. The articles were generally good and age-appropriate; but one entitled "The Face Only a Mother Could Love" from Southern Living caught me a little off-guard with the first sentence: "Beauty may be skin-deep, but when you're talking about an armadillo, ugliness goes all the way to the bone. What other animal looks like it was fashioned from leftover parts after God finished making everything else?" Ouch!!!!! So they may not be a delicate humming bird or a powerful tiger, but let's not teach our kids to be so snarky! I'll admit that armadillos seem a bit unfortunate, but have you seen Sphynx cats? Give me an armadillo any day over those!

2.a. Country Facts - I checked out both the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Along with maps and pictures of the flags, there were general facts about the geography and population, as well as a listing of important historical events. But more than that I like the fact-finder worksheets at the top of each article. I appreciate that each of these is created by professionals using reliable sources, but the articles referenced from the two countries I looked up are, frankly, old. The newest one from either is 2006. I'm sorry but in that respect Wikipedia's gotcha beat!

2.b. Maps of the World - I started out using some of the 7 boxes of map choices listed along the top of the page...maybe I'm just a negative Nelly today, but I was not impressed with these maps for the most part. It's nice that you can print the map out in color, but it bothers me that all the maps I looked at had dates of 1998 or older. Most teachers wouldn't look favorably on print information that old, so to have it in an electronic resource is disappointing. When I started using the alphabet options & the search options, I was amazed to see how many more options for maps there were. Many of these were much more interesting and informative. However, I was still disappointed by the timeliness of some of them. One map of the US for "Immigrants Admitted by Intended State of Residence" was from 1992! This is way too old!

2.c. I decided to explore the "Fiction" area. Not bad, not too bad at all. It's nice that most of the stories are short so they aren't hard to read on a computer, if you don't want to print them. These would be useful things to have for summer reading extras.

I also found the overall layout of this database to be rather unappealing.