Oh, mama, can this really be the end?

Final thoughts:

Completing this set of exercises took a lot more time than I anticipated, partly because once I’m into something I find it hard to let go. Partly too because there was so much to try.

Even though I was aware of the function of most (all?) of the listed databases, I had not done much hands on with any of them. There’s no substitute for hands on to work through all the little details that get you where you want to go.

As I only work at the reference desk on a very part-time basis I am uncertain how much I will retain of all those little details. But at least I will have seen them once and perhaps my stumbling will be less as I try to us the tools in front of our patrons.

I take that back, NetLibrary was more new to me, though I was aware of its existence. But as it doesn’t seem to have many current materials, I wasn’t that excited by it.

Cleaning out my desk recently I stumbled upon an infographic from a presentation on training from 2008. It presents preferred learning styles, or at least learning skills, across various generations. (See left…) Boomers are described as having course-based text and lecture styles, where as younger folk are expected to be more included to learning by doing. This series of exercises worked our “younger” working styles… Will it turn back the clock as well?

So long and thanks for all the fish!
Maid Marian Librarian

So many databases, so little time…

As we’ve already been introduced to several of these databases in this course a lot of this week’s material is review. Or maybe it’s just because in our library we use the MasterFile Premier database fairly regularly for patron requests, and Academic Search Complete for more academic research requests.  We’ve been introducing patrons to MasterFile Premier every time they come in to ask for information from a recent Consumer Reports issue (and although the EBSCO index doesn’t say that CR is indexed in the Academic Search Complete database, I just did a search on Refrigerators and found the same 116 articles from CR in both databases.)  This is the single best way I’ve found to introduce patrons to the marvels of Marvel.

Just for fun I tried the query re: zinc in food. Although there were articles listed in MasterFile Premier, most of them seemed bases on studies of the importance of zinc in diets and how/whether to provide zinc by supplement. I thought I might get better results from a more focused database and tried the same query (‘zinc food’) in the HealthSource Consumer edition. I limited the list of full text articles that came up to the narrower subject of ‘health’ and the top article remaining was called “Foods that fuel the Immune System”, from a newsletter called Environmental Nutrition. The article contained this phrase: “Zinc food sources include red meat, poultry, seafood,beans, nuts and cheese.”

I knew that one of the databases in EBSCO was  LISTA  (library,information science & Technology abstracts), but I thought I’d see if the journals represented in that index are also reported in Academic Search Complete (which they are.) I have been disappointed with this database in that so many of the articles do not have full text access – but I did come across again the fact that Library Technology Reports has complete full text articles for all but the most recent issues.  This is a journal I used frequently in library school, so I am glad to be reminded of its availability to me now. Reviewing the October 2012 issue I note an article on accessibility to e-readers for the print-disabled that those of us who are loaning e-readers should probably review!

I’ve not really used Netlibrary, but it took me entirely too long to sort out how to get to the resource. Fool that I am, I tried looking under N in Marvel (for Netlibrary of course…) but it isn’t there. You have to choose the database “EBSCOhost e-book collection” to get there. Not very patron friendly – or librarian friendly for that matter. Once there I see some 8,600 books listed, mostly non-fiction. As  I am responsible for the philosophy collection here I started looking undert that subject, and found a small collection older titles. Opening the books I was disappointed to find that while the text of the item was indeed all there, it was all smushed up at the top of the page. I thought at first there was text missing, but it  is literally single spaces lines of text that fill about a quarter of the page due to the formatting.

I tried again using the subject ‘library*’ and found 484 results – mostly computer related, but also mostly not new. There was one dated 2012 (Computer Ethics), and opening that I was pleased to find it formatted for online reading.  Just to see how many new items there were I fell back to the whole list of 8,600+ items and limited the date to 2012. Up came 54 items. On the plus side a) all of the ones I looked at were formatted for online reading, and b) one of them was book on preparing for the ASVAB test, a book that is regularly swiped from our collection!

As for looking at materials for Constitution Day, I found two books that related to the history of the U.S. Constitution that might be applicable. Doing a slightly different search (constitution and U.S., instead of constitutional history- united states) there were a couple more possibilities.

Searching for materials published by a company with Nebraska or Oklahoma in its name, we get some 80 books published by the the presses of those universities. Upon limiting by the suggested subjects to whatever our patron is looking for we end up with a smaller list.  However, not being satisfied with the choice of Nebraska OR Oklahoma, for fun I tried Nebraska OR Colorado in the publisher field. While I got results published by the University of Nebraska or the University of Colorado, there were also books published by the University of Utah with COLORADO in the title. There is clearly something about this searching process I am not understanding….

Learning Express – not just for patrons!

I created an ID for this when the BTOP computers first came out – I was very excited to review the techology tutorials it includes. For purposes of this review though I experimented with one of the SAT prep tests to see how the scoring worked. Although the application gave me my score as well as suggesting courses I should take to improve that score, I particularly appreciated the explanations for the correct answers. I liked that there were tests available for a variety of levels, from elementary school (good for homeschoolers) up to adult career oriented exams. Someone came in to our library a while back to use the Commercial Driver’s License prep and test. I don’t even know how he knew it was there. Because he had a problem with the course (turned out to be a virus on the computer) I downloaded it to my own account – and oddly I now can not delete it. Let’s hear it for technical glitches!

In the section on job search I explored a class on networking. My daughter went through the job search process last year, after college, and it’s clear to me that the days of reading the classified, even the online ones, are already in the past.  As far as I can tell most jobs are filled via networking. The available courses which allow a person to brush up on (or learn) networking and interviewing seem like good starting points in today’s world.

Skill building was an interesting section, both because it had materials relating to topics I would not have expected to be in this collection (financial literacy or public speaking for example) and because in an application that takes so much advantage of interactive tools (not only in the tests, but chapters in courses as well), most of the skills options were actually e-books, not interactive electronic courses. Once you’re accustomed to the interactivity, e-books begin to feel old-fashioned. I also continue to have a grudge agains reading e-books online, so I would personally prefer to print these and read them on paper.

Having browsed through all the opportunities, it’s still the technology tutorials that draw me in. I took all three levels of the MS Outlook courses, and found small tidbits in each one that were helpful.

Dalton, Dalton, who has a Dalton?

Searching on my first/last name and birth year I find 1) birth records from Minnesota 2) Public records for both my current and former addresses in Maine (probably from voter registration records) at results numbers 1 and 3 out of 337,194 records!

Oddly, the marriage record wasn’t that easy. I put in my full name (with middle name) and marriage date, and got a bunch of Daltons but nothing within easy reach was me. So I put in my husband’s name (different last name) and the date, and a record for him as primary and me as secondary appeared in 8th place (with middle initial, not full name), despite the fact that only two of the records above ours had a Marian in the record at all, and none of them had a matching date. I then tried entering my own name again, using only middle initial, and this time the same record, in the same position, comes up as when I used my spouse’s name. Using the advanced search feature you can limit results to exact matches. Trying that option “for all fields” resulted in zero results (harumph!). But then I tried it just for the date, and for either name that is the one result that appears.

I had trouble determining what location to use (where we lived? where we got married?) but then realized it would be the location where the license was issued.  So I tried locating my mom’s certificate, (lived in Detroit but got married in South Dakota) and that was easy. Just her first/last name,  the state and year brought her record right to the top. Entering my dad’s name gave the same results, though he was listed as primary. Maine’s records have my spouse as primary no matter which way I searched. It also answered the question as to which name you search by for marriage records – married name or maiden name. Which makes it hard to find a marriage record if all you have is the married name of the woman….

I found both sets of grandparents in the 1930 and 1940 census – beyond that I wasn’t sure where they lived.  I did note that the 1940 census had my grandmother’s name (Lona) spelled incorrectly (Lena).

I wasn’t sure what was meant by searching under the photos and maps tab. I did do a search with my grandfather name in South Dakota, then chose the option to see “maps, atlases, and gazetteers”. This gave me a 1911 land ownership map which showed the land owned by my great grandfather at that point, that my uncle still owns. I had no idea those kinds of records were available (1860-1918).  I also found the “view map” link in the census records that show the location of the house my grandparents lived in during the 1940 census. I can’t find it again, but at one point I did locate a check off box that said photo’s and maps, which didn’t give me any pictures of my own ancesters, but showed lots of yearbook photos for other Daltons.

Oh wait, if I click the Search tab on the home page, I get a map, and clicking on Maine in that map gives me a substantial list of Maine-related databases. Scrolling down on the right sidebar I find the header Photos and Maps, split into the two separate databases of Pictures and the Maps, Atlases, and Gazetteers I referenced above.  This time I entered my father’s name in the pictures link and found an entry from his college yearbook in Iowa. Yet another database in which I spend hours and not have a clue how long it’s been…

Do I have Alzheimers?

So from the get-go this time I have learned a new thing – how did I not notice the publications link at the top of (many of) the Ebsco host databases? (I did just go back to econlit and didn’t find that link there.) I had been getting to this option from the link on the Marvel home screen. While exploring those top links in the Health database I noticed the medical dictionary as well, which I’m sure would be helpful while reading all that medical terminology.

I chose to search for articles on Alzheimer’s disease, and limited my search to articles published since 2005. Even so there were nearly 700 results.  I was grateful for the instructions on how to sort, as the term “relevance” didn’t catch my eye as a possibility for finding sort options, despite understanding what it means to be sorted by relevance. When your eye is moving quickly over the screen to find an option, you don’t always stop to evaluate whether there might be other terms for what you are looking for.

The article I read was from the Harvard Health Newsletter, and since, like most of the publications listed, the publication is geared for consumers I had no problem reading it. It did talk about beta-amyloid plaque deposits, and if this were the first time I had read anything about alzheimer’s I could have tried the medical dictionary for that, but I wouldn’t have gotten much edification : “an amyloid that is derived from amyloid precursor protein and is the primary component of plaques characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.” Seems like a longer way to say beta-amyloid plaque to me.

Just for kicks I went and did the same search in Medline, ending up with over 5000 results. A quick perusal through the publication list verifies the medical-intended audience of this data base. Medline Plus, geared for the rest of us, gave me over 800 results but no way to limit, or even sort, by date . On the other hand, the “refine by keyword” option looked like a good way to focus the search – using the “remix” link gave me an interestingly different set of results, so don’t assume it’s all there for the reading. Also no publication list here, but it looked like several of the links pointed to NIH. Looks like it might be a good complement to the Consumer Health Database.

Now I need to backtrack to what we were actually asked to look at in Medline. In addition to the keyword search function, there’s a helpful home screen with many useful options. Top keywords today are: aspirin, breast cancer, diabetes, emphysema, and maybe heroin. The Health News option is the only place I can see to get the most recent news, though you have to then click on the link to the topic to get “news” sorted by topic. I’d have to spend time reviewing the data to figure out when an item ceases to be news.  The new Assuming the drug database is kept up to date (and why wouldn’t it be, given its source) it seems a helpful place to go to understand uses and potential effects of any medicine. Using the Health Topics option allowed me to focus my Alzeimer’s search better right up front, and offered areas of exploration I may not have thought about right away. My problem with  Medical databases is that I tend to assume I can see many of the symptoms in me and I start to worry. So I don’t spend too much time exploring here!

I’m glad I spent time playing with the tutorial and video links. Some of them worked just fine, although one short one I tried had to download the whole thing before it would play. The tutorials weren’t a problem, but the anatomy videos all seem to require Quick time, which I didn’t have on my PC. They said they would direct me to a site to download Quicktime, but it didn’t seem to happen.  I can fix that so it’s not a probelm in the future, but someone less familiar with the PC world might be confused.

Where I am reminded how much I don’t know about searching…Business resources (part 2)

Econ Lit is a database i hadn’t explored at all, and as a former small business owner I enjoyed the exercise.  However, it’s clear I don’t do searching for a living . I tend to be a basic words searcher, which doesn’t get me the short list of pithy results you want.

Checking out the key words “small business” there were over 4300 results – of those only some 1500 with full text results. Still plenty for what I was doing, but if I were really doing research I might be annoyed. I should have known but did not remember that you don’t need to quote a phrase in EBSCO search ; the search  assumes that when words are found together they are more relevant. There was an interesting difference in the search results when  I changed the search mode from the default (boolean/phrase) to “find all search terms” : I ended up with more than 10,000 results, but now the words small and business were not always together.  Advance search of course gives you more specific choices. But knowing all the options doesn’t translate to being a good searcher.

Hmmm. looking at the original query: resources for small business owners. Small business is where I started, but it’s clearly too broad. Small business owner(s) only gave me 156 (or 37 if you limit the phrase to the title of the document using advanced search.)  I had already tried adding “resources” to the search string, but although that increased the result list significantly, the use of the term resource is much too generic. So I tried a couple others, such as assistance, or aid. Better, but somehow I need a more clear picture of what I’m looking for before I can do this search appropriately. I could try specific assistance (financing, sba, managerial?) but as a generic search I’m coming up short.

Small business and EPA  seemed easier, but there were precious few results that actually related to “small business”. Mostly they just had the two words somewhere. I kept looking for an “adjacent” boolean term, but I never found it. I do like the Smart Text searching – coming up with similar articles – but if you don’t have the exact right model to begin with you end up with more results that just aren’t quite right. Small business and Tax Policy seemed to fit what the database indexed more closely ; just 7 results but over half seemed very applicable.

Value Line  – I’ve actually had a fair bit of practice reading the numbers in Value Line, but I hadn’t explored the Selection and Opinion portion. This looks to be an intriguing place to focus some additional stock selection activity. I’ve been trying to focus on socially responsible investing – while the selection and opinion documents won’t do that for me, they can be used to limit the number of stocks I may have to look through to find those that meet my criteria.  Since I used to work for IBM I used that as my search term , and was relieved to see that the folks at Value Line still think it’s a good long-term stock pick.

While this is all good, on the flip side, I had the same problem trying to get back to other Marvel databases from ValueLine as I did from Gale databases… and this time I didn’t locate the return route… Any pointers?

Wall St. Journal – This seems to operate in much the same way as EBSCO, with a few additional likely variations like indices for People, locations (I was looking for that in EconLit), companies, and industry codes. Entering the suggested Small Business and Health Insurance brought back many interesting results… reading a few of the top results takes enough time that I’ve been playing with this lesson for several hours, thank you very much! I did limit the results by date, which made them more relevant to today.  This is another place I’ve not spent any time, and I hope I will remember to use it to help answer future desk questions (as well as do some of my own research.)

Learning about my spouse’s profession (Business Resources – Part 1)

You know there are two kinds of people when trying new things… the kind that go ahead and wing it, just to see what they can do, and those who read the directions first, and do it right the first time.  I’m a combo beast, but I almost always start with the try it approach… which means I spend a lot of time exploring! This time I started by just typing in the term “surveying” in the search box (my spouse is a self-employed surveyor) and from there got lost (again…) in the pile of stuff that came back, trying to find articles of potential interest to him.  I found lots – or at least lots of interest to me, in terms of understanding the trials and tribulations of today’s surveyor.  But then I realized most of them were coming out in that magazine my spouse brings piles of on long car rides, so he can catch up on his reading, so most of them won’t be new to him.  And I thought I could wow him with my results!

Back to the program. While I’ve been using database searches for a long time, EBSCO’s and others, and I’m not flumoxed by the options you can/must use to narrow your search results I have to say that the intro search and results screen for this and any other EBSCO database is not very inviting. Its many boxes and options make it intimidating: contrast this to a clean google search screen (although by default with no where near the clear functionality for limiting your search).  I feel sort of the same way I do when I start to read anything in Russian – and I was a Russian major in college. It’s just looks complicated.

So I tried the visual search. A couple things immediately become apparent: 1) the interface uses more processing power and it takes a while to produce results ; 2) it appears 250 may be the maximum result set and 3) while it’s easy to scroll through the result list fast, it’s harder to scroll through it slowly (where’s the windows scroll bar?)  I guess I’m not a visual person ; complex as it is, I want my text based screen back.

While the Gale Business Essentials wasn’t part of this assignment, I thought I’d see what was different there.  I much prefer the look and feel of the less complex Gale search interface but it was harder to limit the results.  Going back on searching on Surveying, I ended up with thousands of results based on variations of the term survey (survey research, surveys show…) but no easy was to remove them. [As an aside, I also found it nigh unto impossible to go back to the marvel database list once in this Gale database. It turns out if you click the More resources tab on the top right of the screen, you get a bar that includes the words “View Gale Resources”. From here you look for the narrow blue band at the top of the screen, and click on the words “Return to Library”. Note that clicking on the Words saying “Marvel! Maine’s Virtual Library” next to it does nothing….]

Moving on to the other databases in the next post. I am realizing that my objection to the EBSCO search screen is less about the plethora of buttons/sliders, which actualy serve a useful purpose, and more about the look and feel of the branding – the big blue EBSCO search button and the tiny little link in green that tells you which database you are searching. If that link could be larger and the EBSCO button less prominent (what does EBSCO mean anyway?)  I’d be less confused everytime I start a search.

Getting lost in NoveList….

I thought I knew the Novelist database pretty well, and I guess relatively speaking I do. But it was good to review options and be reminded of how this information can be used by staff.  Mostly we’ve been showing patrons what Novelist is and how to get there, then sort of leaving them on their own to discover it. But I’m sure we can do more…

It took me two hours of exploration (Candian fiction? Fantasy novels? Historical mysteries? Teen Fantasy? My how many books I’ve missed!) before I actually got down to the assignment.   For the series I chose on that I had just found in my meanderings, called the Imager Chronicles.  I typed in  “Imager” and clicked series… and got nothing.  Hmm… Then I tried the author , which was clearly recognized, but still not results. After a while said oh heck, lets go back to home and start all over again, and by golly it worked. So I think what happened was that my previous meanderings left me in an area of the database for “recommended reads” , and this series and author weren’t listed there, so didn’t show up when I typed them in. But it wan’t clear that’s what was going on at the time.

Trying the David Baldacci exercise shows how many different ways there are to get to a goal here. I started off as suggested, entering the author’s name and checking out the list of read-a-likes.  Expanding on that, clicking on the appeal terms that seem appropriate on the right hand pane gives a greater list of potential reads, though depending on your term choices perhaps not as closely tied to to the original item. For example, I left out the associated genre and ended up with among other things books classed as historical romance. Then I went back to the home page, and came at it from a different direction: under the ‘more’ arrow is the author read-a-likes option. This linked to an article by Joyce Saricks with suggested read-a-like authors, most of whom were the same as the list directly from Novelist but there were some on each list that wasn’t on the other, so doing both is not a bad thing to do.

Here at Curtis we have started regular monthly displays of read-a-likes , and novelist is a wonderful tool for generating list of items we can use to fill and re-fill the displays.

Having said that though, I found it annoying that while there is a search bar on the home page, and an advanced search option that is probably fairly functional, each of the provided lists (the author read-a-likes, the grab and go, etc.) each was organized alphabetically by title, but “Browse” doesn’t mean “search”. So if I wanted to find Fantasy I couldn’t just type fantasy, as I would then miss lists of Classic Fantasy etc.

Doesn’t mean I don’t find a lot of information here though.

Puzzles are for kids, apparently

So while I am a wanna-be knitter, as a techie I thought I’d see what was under the “electronics and games” category. Ah ha! Puzzles! Now that’s up my alley! It’s a good thing I didn’t have to enter all the search terms though. Here’s what was generated by simply clicking on Puzzles:

(AN 27621947) OR ((DE puzzles OR DE Riddles OR DE “crossword puzzles*” OR DE “word games*” OR DE “picture puzzles” OR DE “maze puzzles” OR DE Jigsaw puzzles* OR TI “Burman’s Brain Benders” OR AB puzzle) NOT (JN “Hobby Profile*” OR quilt OR stamp OR JN “Antique Shoppe Newspaper” OR “video games” OR AN 19695091 OR JN “Stereo World” OR SO Gaming OR XX Zanthor))

A little translation might be in order (from the Help link of course)  : AN – Accession Number (a general article about the field) ; DE – Description (heading or keyword) ; TI – article Title  ; AB – Abstract ; JN – Journal Title (Phrase indexed) ; SO – Journal Title (word indexed) …but XX? I never found that. Also, I don’t quite understand why all the NOT’s are in there. Looking at some of them I don’t see how they would have been picked up to begin with . For example, AN 19695091 is about model railroads, with nary a word about puzzles in sight. And Zanthor? He’s a magician, and a video of his on how to pull a tablecloth from under a dinner service seriously invites exploration… but no hint of the word Puzzle in the entry.

Well, nevermind, I should be looking at what WAS found, right? So I started looking at the result list. The first several were puzzle pages form Burman’s Brain Benders – just the kind of thing I was hoping to find, except it was all for kids. So I tried to narrow results by publication – and they were mostly for kids. Except for woodworking projects – lots of how to projects from a woodworking magazine. There was only one crossword  entry, a one off puzzle in a Boating World magazine.  I was hoping for links to Games magazine, for example. What, do they think only kids like games? Sigh.

Oh, wait, here’s a maze puzzle for the grown-ups: Race car driver

And to be perfectly fair, I don’t see a physical copy of Games magazine in any library in Maine.

Downeaster finally here?

This week we were looking at the Maine Newstand. I chose to check out news about the DownEaster train which is FINALLY coming to Brunswick, supposedly on Nov. 1.  The tutorial linked to from the Marvelous Maine Invitational Blog was quite complete and direct – very helpful.  I was able to sort and limit my searches (though it took me entirely too long to discover the little tab under the timeline that one could move to limit the time frame of the results), and the citing options (both here and in the Britannica) are incredibly useful tools. (I hate to remember the hours I spent typing citations and footnotes into my high school papers.)  Hmm.. like calculators, do they help us avoid learning how to accomplish things by doing them for us? How many of us could cite an article if we didn’t have tools like these?

Anyway, the glitch I found – and if I’m wrong I hope someone will read this and correct me! – is that I tried to create an alert and/or an RSS feed, in hopes of determining the difference. Trying the former, I ended up with an error message: “A server error caused your requested action to fail. Please try again.”  Trying the RSS feed I just get a window saying “set up your RSS feed”, with a help icon that directs me to a description of RSS feeds, which I already understand. It appears I may have to have a research account to use either of these features? Is this true? What’s the point of having yet another place to look for these messages, when they ask for your e-mail address?

Sign me confused this time.