Week 3 Newspapers and Maine Newstand

It always takes a while to get back to work and caught up after a week of vacation.  I was happy to see that many bloggers are behind.  Hopefully next week I will have time to do two lessons.

Stephanie your tutorials are very informative and easy to understand.  They need to be available to the public.  Many of the patrons that I help with MARVEL are adult students.  Once I show them the resources and get them started they want to explore on their own.  Your tutorials would help them learn without the embarrassment of  asking for more help.

I searched for Winslow Homer.  I would love to have the time to go see the new exhibit in Portland and then tour his studio.  Right now I have to settle for reading about it.  In the basic search I got 9449 results searching Winslow Homer.  In the advanced search by limiting my results to one year I had 58 results.  I ordered the articles with the newest ones first and found several interesting artilces that I had not read yet.  I was not able to set an "Alert" but I did save my search.  If I find the time I will go back and try the alert again.

I have used this data base many times and find if very useful.  The obituary section is wonderful and many parons are amazed that you can search all Maine papers or the many papers in ProQuest at the same time.  Quickly finding an obituary or showing someone how easy it is to use this tool is one of the "magic tricks" of being a librarian.

I spent some time yesterday reading blogs.  It was fun to see what everyone is doing and read about their experiences.  I liked leaning about the earthquake - I missed it while I was on vacation.  I had some trouble commenting, but that was not knowing enough about blogging.  I am learning.

I am amazed by the number of non-traditional students from the Penquis Higher Education Center that come to the library looking for journals.  Many of them are not comfortable using a data base so it can be a frustating process for both teacher and learner.  The more I learn the easier it is for me to help others.

Lesson 2b Britannica Public Library Edition

I spent way too much time playing in the Britannica Public Library Edition today.  One item leads to another article and then another and then a little video clip and before you know it it's an hour later than you thought.  I have taken a training on the Britannica from the company trainer, but I still found new things to explore.  I "jumped" to the kids edition for a while and will definately keep that as an option for use with the public, recommending it as a starting place for a seach that will answer many questions at an easier reading level.

I choose Hugo Chavez and the new presidential election in Venezuela.  The 4th article was a very good article about his presidency and did have the results of the Oct. 2012 election.  I translated the article into Chinese and then has trouble getting it back to English.  Our local High School (Foxcroft Academy) has over 100 foreign students so the translator sould be very useful. 

I spent some time exploring the research tools.  My favorite is the timeline.  Did you know that in 3500BC Egyptian women began brewing beer ?

The Biography of the Day amd this Day in History were interesting and I did check out my birthday.  I think that my patrons will find the easy access to concise articles on almost any topic to be the most valuable.  Having an easy-to-understand article as a starting place is the best way for a person to get basic answers and to begin a more in-depth  search.  Following the many options for more information and related items is very useful. 

Access to the New York Time is an added bonus.

Lesson 1

I watched the tutorials.  Very basic but explained things very clearly.  I decided to log in at home so I would be familiar with that process.  I did not realize that you needed to belong to a Minerva or Ursus Library to log in with your last name and barcode number.  This morning I had a patron call me from home because he could not get into MARVEL.  I was glad that I had worked on this at home because that screen does not come up at the library. 

I did a quick search on Maine Newsstand for the new Winslow Homer Exhibit.  Seaching Homer, Winslow I has 1200 hits.  By limiting my seach to the last 3 months I found the article I wanted very quickly.

My first blog post ! This has been an interesting process just to get this far. I have been looking at some of the other blogs and I want a pretty one like Janets.