useful websites

One of the sites we make use of here at the Hot Springs Public Library is http://www.abebooks.com/  We use this site when gathering information about old books that are donated.  Any books we feel might be of significant value, this site is very helpful for giving us direction in terms of selling. 

We also use http://www.infoplease.com/ for a online reference resource.  It includes a dictionary, thesuarus, encyclopedia, and many other facets which are useful to our student patrons.

Kids that are looking to reinforce math and reading skills, we recommend  http://www.funbrain.com/  This site is useful to a wide variety of ages. It includes both learning and fun!

Wrap-up

In reflecting on the last weeks of participating in the electronic resources challenge, pretty much everything was a new discovery, except for World Cat.  I have only been working at the Hot Springs Public Library a little over one year.  I spend most of my time cataloging materials.  This leaves very little time for interaction with the patrons.  When I do, however, I feel I am better equipped now with resources in which to answer questions.  Probably the biggest discovery I made was with the availability of on-line practice tests available through Learning Express.  I have already made use of them in directing patrons with help on studying for the GED.  I have found these to be an excellent resource.  I now know that when patrons ask about their own history, it won't necessarily be found in hard copy form with access to Ancestry and Heritage Quest.  I plan on doing some Inservice work with our local schools to make them aware of such resources as World Book Online.  I will continue to use World Cat for ILL's and looking up call numbers when cataloging ciculation.  In closing, this has been a great learning experience, not only for me, but for all of our staff.  I look forward to continuing my library education in June.

Sanborn Maps

In looking at the Sanborn maps of South Dakota, I chose Hot Springs of course, because that is where I have chosen to live.  Our community has changed significantly over the years, and these maps represent the ways the layout of our town has evolved.  The names of streets have changed.  Buildings have changed in their purpose.  Many of the buildings still exist, but are not in use.  Some of our buildings have been restored, and some no longer exist due to demolition.  The building I chost to refer to is one of the many that overlook the city of Hot Springs.  It was the K-8 school from 1896-1960.  A beautiful sandstone building that has been preserved over the years.  It now houses the Pioneer Museum.  Sanborn Maps are accessed quite frequently in our library because folks come in whose ancestors founded this town and are looking for maps from history.  What an excellent research tool right at our fingertips.

Heritage Quest #1

What a learning adventure this has been.  Today I accessed the Heritage Quest electronic resource.  I found it to be much like the Ancestry challenge.  I went on a search of information about my grandfather on my mom's side.  In a round about way I found information on him by looking up what I thought his father's name was, only to realize that wasn't his father's name at all.  My parents had led me to believe all these years that this ws true.  Who I thought was his father was always referred to as his uncle.  This really makes me question some things about my heritage.  I also found out what my namesake is.  My grandfather's sister was named Edith M., was born in October, and went by the name Edie, just like I do.  OK, so this opens all new doors for me.  I now have a renewed sense of identity.  This resource will be beneficial to our patrons who are doing this kind of research.

Ancestry #4

This morning I am back in Ancestry, and am wondering why I wasn't aware of this site before.  When doing research for the picture portion I only pulled up something about yearbooks which were from Spearfish.  These seemed to be only journals that people kept of their travels.  I realized this wasn't what I was looking for and started over.  This time I plugged my oldest brother Fred's name into a refining search.  Jackpot!  I found my brother, who is 20 years my elder, was a very active "Spearfish Spartan."  There were football, basketball, choir, and many more pictures of him.  Pretty Sweet!  I can hardly wait to share the information with him and his family.

Ancestry #3

OK so I looked up my grandma on my mom's side of the family.  This has been the hilight of my day.  First of all I found out my grandma spelled her name two different ways.  It was interesting how you could pull up information from different census.  In visiting with my coworker, I found out they only make census info like what I found available every so many years.  I found out my garndma and her family live in Spring Valley,SD in 1910.  Her father's birthplace was Germany and mother's was New York.  In 1930 she lived in Lead, SD.  My mom graduated from Lead HS in 1936.  So now that all makes sense.  I never knew my grandfather was eight years older than grandma and that they had their first child together when she was only 14.  My mom was born when grandma was 16.  I'm talking about this because I wasn't aware of all this information before.  I made many more observations when looking up my grandfather.  It will be interesting  to find info about my dad's side of the family because I never met my grandparents on his side of the family.

Ancestry #2

Well I finally was able to access Ancestry with a click and go.  Come to find out our library has two IP Internet addresses and most of our computers were not registered with the resources.  I should have questioned this in the beginning when for each resource challenge I was prompted with a username and password.  This should have only happened with WorldCat because of ILL's.  This was definitely a learning experience in and of itself.   After logging my name into Ancestry I was shocked to see how many Edith M. Hoopers there are in the world.  It did list me, however, and all of the places I've ever lived plus even the street addresses.  I'm sure as I delve into this resource further, I will be able to find out much more about myself and my family.  It will also be a great resource for our patrons as they will now be able to click and go to find information:) Oh, and I realize now that I should have looked up information according to my maiden name. 

Ancestry

I have been trying to access this site to follow up on this portion of the challenge, but there seems to be someting up with our library's  IP address.  This site is asking for username and password.  I contacted Julie E. with the State Library and she said I should just be able to click and go from the website.  Hopefully by the end of the day this will happen for me.  I do not have Internet access from home so am relying on the library to complete challenge requirements.  Just wanted to let you know what was happening.  Thank you for being patient.  Although this has been quite a learning experience in and of itself:)

OAIster

I have been experimenting with this resource tool for a couple of days now.  It is fairly comprehensive.  I have viewed several primary source documents, including many Native American pictures.  I found 8,272 available resources, many of which included surrounding states and were hard to filter through.  In order for me to really find the value of this resource I would have to spend much more time with it.
It seems to be a tremendous resource for finding primary and secondary source documents.

WorldCat

I have used WorldCat in my cataloging job here at the Hot Springs Public Library.  It has been a very useful tool in finding out Dewey Decimal numbers for books that I'm not sure of.  Today, for the challenge, I typed "Black Beauty" in as a title with Anna Sewell being the author.  It gave me 1,542 initial results with 982 libraries worldwide. The top library was Black Hills State University.  Here at the Hot Springs Library, we always try to access our materials from the State Library first.  The call number for this item was juvenile fiction.  When doing further research on Anna Sewell as an author, to my surprise she hasn't written many more items.  She authored  "Black Beauty His Groom and Companions" and "Black Beauty the Autobiography of a Horse".  I am anxious to learn more about the facets of WorldCat to help process Interlibrary loan requests.

Proquest 2

The next step in learning about the electronic resource of Proquest was to click on the publications tab.  Because I have been an educator for 29 years, I chose to look up teaching publications.  It's funny that this particular resource was never brought to my attention in all those years.  I chose to research electronic learning in your classroom and how to weave technology into any lesson you teach.  The article was a bit outdated, but still a very valuable resource especially to new teachers and those that may still be afraid of getting their feet wet with technology in the classroom.  You know who you are:)  I could really envision doing a workshop for classroom teachers to introduce this resource.  I am just new in the library business and am finding out there are many resources such as this that would be of interest to our local teachers free of charge.

Proquest 1a

Today I am looking at a cohort's Proquest Challenge search on a lady by the name of Edith Wharton. In the beginning I had no idea who this person was in history other than the fact that she and I share the same first name.  It was interesting that a "basic" search resulted in 2442 articles about this one person.  I can see how this might be a bit overwhelming for anyone, especially a student.  She then went on to discuss how to go about narrowing the search with the use of "suggested subjects" feature which efficiently narrowed her search to 17 results-a much more manageable number.  I can see this being an effective tool when helping our patrons to narrow their own searches on particular subjects.  I am excited to make more use of this electronic resource.  It will be a valuable tool to share with my fellow educators.

Proquest

Well I finally got my State Library Card which makes it much easier to access the on-line resources.  I have been looking at articles on Proquest this past week.  In the beginning I typed in "American Idol", because I wanted to find out what kinds of articles were being printed about that.  I found out there were many of which I was totally disinterested.  However, on the news the other night I briefly heard something about a new gold mine being discussed which would be on the backside of Spearfish Canyon.  That definitely peaked my interest, as I grew up in Spearfish.  I have spent almost an hour just filtering through the many articles.  So far I have found out that they are putting a new roof on the hatchery, installing the American Dipper Birdboxes, and that a Spearfish student was named volunteer of the year.  All of these items plus many more were new learning for me.  Even though I did not find (which I will)  what I set out to,  I found this to be a very valuable asset for finding rliable current events on-line.

Learning Express

Today I spent some time looking at The Learning Express feature.  How cool is this!  So many times our patrons want to practice taking exams such as GED or SAT etc.  When I show them our resource books it is a bit overwhelming, as they are so big and thick.  This will be a nice direction in which to lead them.  I logged in and took part of the GED Reading test.  I found it to be a very comprehensive test which provided a good measure of knowledge.  It was great to get instant feedback and to find out where my strengths and weaknesses lie.  This is a test you could retake and see continual improvement.  It is non-threatening like the actual test would be.  For a person getting ready to take the GED it is a profound example of what to expect. 

Next I went into Job Search and the Workplace which provided me with an e-book called Search Smart and Get Ahead.  I thought this was of great help because you were able to access the information without buying an expensive textbook.  This book contained many ideas on how to go about doing different kinds of research maybe for a thesis paper or something. I found this to be a wonderflul resource. 

The last thing I did was download an ebook on getting ready for 4th grade assessment tests.  I can't tell how this will be of extreme value to teachers and students across the nation in preparation for state standards tests.  This book is nice because it could be used by an individual or by a group.  I will also let our homeschoolers know about this resource.  It was a very rewarding day with the Learning Express.

Madagascar

In the reference center section I chose to look at information about the country of Madagascar because that is where the "fossa" is from and I am interested in finding out more about the country where this animal resides.  As I look at the information in both the right and left margins and consider who our patrons are, I believe the information in the right margin would be of much more benefit than that in the left.  I say this because of looking at it from a student's research standpoint, unless of course you were taking some type of world politics or current events class then the info on the right would be.  There is no doubt that the info on the left is much more valuable to our patrons.   On the article of the title page right away I noticed how this article is aligned with content standards.  For teacher's this is a great connection.  The information on the left would be a great resource for putting together a classroom presentation such as a PowerPoint.  I love the related links to the web in additon to the basic information about Madagascar.  As an educator, this particular piece of World Book would be a great resource.

World Book Lesson 1-Fossa

This animal is called the "fossa".  It lives in the forests of Madagascar.  I chose this animal because my knowledge of it is non-existent.  It is a mammal that has no known predators except humans, and is in danger of becoming extinct.  When researching this animal in the kid's section I found the information to be presented in a very simple matter, such as the vocabulary used.  The info was also presented in a chart format which is easier for young learners to comprehend.  When comparing the info format to Info-finder, I found the information to be much more detailed and the vocabulary used was much more in-depth for more young adult learners.  What a neat site to gather research.  This would have been an excellent tool for my fourth graders and for current patrons who access our library.

New Experience

This is my first experience with blogging.  Just messin' around.  I did some research with World Book  last week and then went on vacation for five days.  Will post info about the resource later this week.