Lesson 6: Net Library

For this lesson, I looked for books on Assisted Living facilities and the first three books were:


Assisted Living: Current Issues in Facility Management and Resident Care
Beat the Nursing Home Trap: A Consumer's Guide to Assisted Living and Long-term Care
Nursing Homes & Assisted Living Facilities: Your Practical Guide for Making the Right Decision.


I thought these were perfect resources for some one who needed information to make a decision about Assisted Living, either for himself/herself or a loved one.


As for researching about Constitution Day, I found the following NetLibrary books which could be recommended to students:


Our Elusive Constitution: Silences, Paradoxes, Priorities
The Bill of Rights: A Bicentennial Assessment 
The Constitution of the United States of America


In trying to use the Advanced Search feature using Nebraska as Publisher; I received the following error message:

A problem has occurred while processing your request. The problem has been logged so that it can be corrected. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Lesson 5: Gale Virtual Reference Library

I searched for information on desegregation in GVRL and was pleased with the results. It was a quick way to access information from a number of different legal encyclopedias and also a good way to get an overview on topics and not be overwhelmed by too many articles to choose from.

I'm not sure why, when I typed in "banana" to try and find out how much potassium is in a banana, my second  and third listings were were about "extraterritoriality" and my fourth about "S corporations"! I did learn the following from the The Gale Encyclopedia of Science:

"The cultivated banana occurs in hundreds of varieties, or cultivars, which vary greatly in the size, color, and taste of their fruits. The variety most familiar to people living in temperate regions has a rather large, long, yellow fruit. This variety is most commonly exported to temperate countries because it ripens slowly,and travels well without spoiling. However, this variety of banana has proven to be susceptible to a recently emerged, lethal fungal disease. The long, yellow banana will soon be largely replaced in the temperate marketplace by another variety, which has a smaller, reddish, apple-tasting fruit." (my highlighting)


I wondered if they found a cure.  The article is from 2004 and we still have the long bananas. So I went to Proquest and found an article, "We Have No Bananas"in the New Yorker dated Jan. 10, 2011.  The virus called Tropical Race Four wiped out the Cavendish banana (long yellow, etc.) in Asia and Australia and is expected to spread to Latin America, the source for  bananas sold and eaten in the U.S.


As to the amount of potassium in a banana, SIRS came through with an article from  the TUFTS UNIVERSITY HEALTH & NUTRITION LETTER , Aug. 2005, Vol 23, No. 6: "Bananas--A good source of magnesium, which protects against bone loss and is associated with heart health, bananas are also packed with potassium. With 422 milligrams of potassium in one medium banana, you're getting almost 10 percent of the 4,700 milligrams the Institute of Medicine says you need. Potassium helps lower blood pressure and reduces the risk of kidney stones and bone loss." 

 So this ended up being a fun way to dabble in a number of resources!

Lesson 4: Proquest

To compare the kinds of information different electronic resources provide, I once again searched for information about Dementia.  This resulted in a listing of very recent scholarly articles about research into dementia which would be very helpful in researching for college level work, but probably not as useful for most lay people.  It is wonderful that such a sophisticated resource is available for our patrons!  It provided something quite different from the other resources we have looked at so far.  It also had a generous number  of articles about Paul Farmer and Greg Mortenson that were accessible reading, and quite suitable for middle school and high school kids.

I read Gentle Reader's Blog, which reminded me to share that when I first used Proquest, I didn't click the "full text documents only" and was very confused about how to get to the first article, as there was no way to read it...  I also looked at Filia's "My Libary Blog" and enjoyed it. 

In the Publications area, I searched for library journals and found 24.  I was surprised when I searched for medical journals and found 38, somehow I expected many more with all their sub-specialties.  However, when I searched for "dermatology" 5 different medical journals popped up, so like in all computer searches, it may be a matter of trying different search terms to get at what you really want.

SIRS Issues Researcher

I looked up  "patriot act and libraries" to see whether there would be information provided about last night's vote in the House, but the most current information was available when looking up the Patriot Act alone, rather than narrowing the topic too much.  When I looked up "dementia" and "alzheimers", topics sometimes of interest to my outreach patrons, both searches yielded information about alzheimers.

Following the Curriclum Pathfinders led me to an interesting "Ask  Dr. Math" site which has answers from Swarthmore College math students to K-12 students' questions. 

My overall impression today is that SIRS Discoverer and Researcher would be very helpful to middle school and high school students in writing papers and when they are panicking over homework when they do not have the right notes or books at hand.

SIRS Discoverer

In exploring the different online resources, I am starting to appreciate the differences in what they offer to students.  The World Book School Edition is a great starting point for straightforward general information on a topic.  SIRS Discoverer is more open ended and lives up to its name in that it can take readers on interesting side trips about their topic. For example in looking up dolphins, one immediately encounters an article about "Cyberfin", a reality dolphin swim program!  Article 5 is about dolphin communication.  Discoverer is a nice way to surf the web about a topic and still know the information is reliable.

As a parent, I have often had to help a child who at 9:30 p.m. realizes he or she did not bring home the textbook and has an assignment to complete for the next day.  This results in a hurried search on the internet to find the right map or history article to help.  SIRS Discoverer's country facts and maps databases are a real find for this situation.  I looked up Puerto Rico, where I spent a big part of my childhood, in the Country Facts and found it to provide a good summary and description of the island and its unique political situation.

The biographies section is good but I was disappointed there were no articles on Greg Mortenson or Paul Farmer. It did a nice job with Barack and Michelle Obama.  It would have been useful if there was a built in feature to suggest closest correctly spelled name.  It showed no articles for "Michele" Obama when I misspelled her first name, which seems like the kind of error that K-9 students might make.