Week 9-Learning Express

Set-up an account in LearningExpress and browse through the available exams.
This was very easy to do. I liked how easy this was to set-up. I wondered if you could set this up for a whole class without using e-mail addresses, but I could not find any way to do that. I know the teachers would find this very valuable if all could login to one site and the results could be there for them to view.
Choose one and answer a few questions. Then click “Score my test” in the top toolbar. Ignore the warnings and continue to have your test scored, so that you can see how the diagnostic page looks. Then click “View Answers” at the bottom of the page. What did you think about this test experience?
I chose both the math and reading tests for 4th grade. First I chose 4th Grade Math Practice: Geometry. I answered the first 5 questions and had my test scored. I really liked the fact that you can see what you did wrong on each question that was wrong in the View My Answers section. I think both kids and adults preparing for a test would also find this very valuable. I am thinking about having my son try these tests to prepare for his NWEA testing. This is a good way to show the kids how to test on a computer in addition to building their test taking skills and knowledge. The second choice was the California 4th Grade Reading Test. This was very good also. I managed to finish this test just because I wanted to see what would happen at the end of a test. It simply says you are finished and it gives you a score. Then you can also view your answers to see which ones were wrong and why they were considered wrong answers.
Job searching and resume writing are among the self-paced courses in LearningExpress.  Click on the “Job Search and Workplace Skills” learning center and add one of the courses to your center.  Take a few minutes to explore the course and note your observations.
I spent a lot of time on this part because I was really curious how this worked. I chose the Creating a Great Resume. It had two segments. Segment 1 fully explained each section of the resume and why it is important to employers. It explained the three types of resumes you can make and then it helped you choose the best one for you. Segment 2 helped you create a resume. This is such a great tool for high school and college students who don’t have a lot of money and are not really sure how to sell their skills to an employer. This walks you through resume creating and then gives you a copy of your resume in text format so you can insert it into a word-processing document that you like to use. It takes all the hard work out of the resume writing.
Type a search term in the search box in the upper left of the home page for a skills improvement or career topic in which you are interested. Notice that results are sorted by tests, courses and eBooks (if all of those are available for your chosen topic). Please select an eBook and look through its pages.
I looked up teaching and found a great ebook that helps parents learn about homeschooling. It had three parts; an overview explaining homeschooling, a language arts section that helps parents know what to expect from their middle school children as they teach them about language arts. It gives reading work for the students to work on and even gives an answer key in the appendix. The third section was mathematics. This section just like language arts talked about mathematic expectations of a middle school child and gave problems and answers for the parent to use with their child. Then there is a huge section of appendixes. The first two deal with language arts, an answer key and a glossary. The next two deal with math, an answer key and glossary are also found here. The next two are resources for both parents and students. The student resources are books to read in all subjects, periodicals that are interesting for kids, movies, computer software, audio resources, and internet websites. The parent resources include books and magazines that support homeschooling, websites for support and reading lists that are middle school appropriate. The last section is Homeschooling Parent Associations. It gives addresses and website for organizations that parents can contact for help. All in all this resource is very valuable for any parent wishing to begin homeschooling their middle school child.

Week 8-Ancestry Library

Ancestry Library

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be dead to be listed in Ancestry Library and can frequently find useful information in the U.S. Phone and Address Directories, 1993-2002. You may even find your marriage license. Search for your own name in Ancestry Library and report the results.

After spending time figuring out how to get access to this, I finally broke down and requested a free trial. I had no problem finding my name when I searched using my maiden name. I was able to see my maiden name results and my marriage license with my married name. When I searched using just my married name I did not find myself at all. I was able to search for my husband’s name and found him no problem. I was only able to find public records for my husband, but I was able to see our Nevada marriage license and public records for myself. We are unlisted in the phone book. I wonder how much that has to do with it.

In Ancestry Library, search for a grandparent or great-grandparent and see if you can locate them in the census.  Report your findings.

I searched for my great-grandmother, Bertha Trebilcock, and was able to find all of her records from the 1930 and 1940 census list. It showed info about my great-grandfather (with a clickable link to his info) and info about her son (also with a clickable link to his info). It was really neat to see that information because it is such a “snapshot” in time. It even knew that her birth date was somewhere around 1896, though it did not have her actual certificate information. I did not know this but her son’s birth name was actually Clifford, not Edward (as we all knew him).

In Ancestry Library, perform a search under the “Photos and Maps” tab for “Maine” as the keyword.  Report your findings. This was hard to find and I actually called ancestry.com to find out how to find it. Once I found the right place to be, I found that there was a lot of information to look through. Under the Collections tab there were Maine census and voter lists, Maine birth, death and marriage info, Maine military lists, a Maine immigration and travel section, Maine newspaper and publications, Maine reference, dictionary and atlas info, Maine maps, atlases and gazetteers, Maine stories, memories and history, Maine schools, directories and church histories, Maine tax, criminal, land and wills. Under the History tab, there were clickable links to the history of Maine, featured Maine data collections, and famous Maine people who had signed their census form. There is also a Help and Advice section that gives you information about Maine towns and counties, family history research, research in New England town, and a link to the Maine Geological Society. The final tab to click on in this section was Resources. This section offered other ways to search for information.

Lets Get Healthy

Health Source: Consumer Edition:

There were a lot of choices of journals, magazines, scholarly journals, etc on the Health Source: Consumer Edition section of Marvel. I searched for Rheumatoid Arthritis and got a lot of results. I read 2 different types of articles from the most recent offerings (2012 and 2010). One was from a magazine, Natural Health, and was an article about a woman’s success with beating back the effects of rheumatoid arthritis. It was an inspirational story about how she fought through the pain and managed to push her RA into remission. She did this by working out five days a week with both cardio and weights. She also changed the ways she ate by substituting fruits for greasy potato chips. After reading this short, inspiring article I thought maybe the more scientific articles may be harder to read. I picked an article from AHFS Consumer Medical Information about a medicine I have taken before. After reading this article, which was consumer friendly, I am glad that I stopped taking it! The article was very easy to understand and I will be passing it on to another colleague that I know takes this medicine. Great resource!

Medline Plus:

1. I could not find Medline Plus on Marvel so I Google searched it and found it on the NIH website. Medline was the only reference on Marvel.

2. When I finally found the page I found that the main page has a lot of info at your fingertips. There were some great articles referenced on the News column on the right side. There were articles about the possibility that people may not need to fast before a cholesterol test, there are gene differences with people who have lung cancer and smoked and those that did not smoke. There was also an article about how spinal steroid shots may not help people who have sciatica. If you were interested you could dig deeper into the news and click on the link that gives you more health news. They also have a section called Top Searches that offers a Wordle application to point out the most searched topics. The bigger the word the more times it has been searched. Asthma, Diabetes, Vitamin D and Hypertension were the most searched so far today.

3. After clicking on Drugs and Supplements, I looked up Levothyroxin. Levothyroxin is the medicine I have to take for my thyroid deficiency. There was a lot of information about this medication. It offered information on when to take this medication, what it is prescribed for, any interactions with other medications, what to do if you forget your medication, and any special diet information you may need to know. I searched for an herbal supplement after and found the same information choices as the prescribed medication.

4. When I searched for rheumatoid arthritis there were a lot more research offerings on Medline Plus than in Health Source: Consumer Edition. They give you a general overview of the disease and then they offer a starting point for your research. Scrolling down the page the topic is divided into many categories for deeper researching. The information seems to come more from organizations and colleges than from periodicals on Medline Plus. The information is more medically written than the Health Source edition and seems to be harder to understand than Health Source. However all results are full text because it links you directly to the website were the information came from.

5. When you click on videos you get a choice of Anatomy videos, Surgery videos and Interactive Tutorials. I looked at a video on rheumatoid arthritis through the interactive tutorials link. It was very good. It would be a great tool for doctors to use with their patients to help explain their disease or medical procedure they have or are going to have. It reads the slides to the user and shows great pictures to along with the descriptive text. When you choose a video to watch you have your choice of Interactive Tutorial (you can control), Self Playing Tutorial (runs by itself) or Text Summary (pdf version of the information).

Business Resources

 Business Source Complete

1. Do a search for available information on FM radio. Pay attention to the types of sources found.

After doing this search on FM radio I found that there were a couple of academic journals and lots of periodical choices.

2. Look for the visual search option and try it. Does it make searching easier or harder? When I did the visual search it loaded in the Column Display Style, which I found very hard to navigate. I changed it to the Block Display Style and found it much more visually pleasing. I actually liked the Visual search much more than the list search I started with. It was easier to see because it put the title and date in block style for you. I thought it did not give an abstract, but when you clicked on the title, the abstract loads on the right. That is very helpful when you are researching because you can preview what its about first then you can decide if it is generally what you are looking for.

EconLit

1. Complete a search to find resources for small business owners.

I did this and I used the visual search, which was much easier to see the results graphically. This topic is very Greek to me so the results did not make a whole lot of sense, but I could see where business-minded people would use this search to find pertinent information for their own businesses.

2. Complete a search for items that pertain to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and small businesses. This only gave me 1 result and I am not certain how helpful it is for that particular topic.

3. Complete a search for items that pertain to tax policy and small businesses. There were a few results to look through on this topic. Again I found the visual search the best way to search. I grouped the results by publication, which allowed me to see where the information was coming from.

Regional Business News

1. Pick a nationally known company. Search under the company’s name and look at the results. I looked up Walmart. I got almost 9,000 results from news and periodical sources.

2. Narrow the regional search to something more appropriate for this area of the country. I added New England in the search box, had it search all terms and got results from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Oregon, Maryland, etc. It searched for New and England and returned results that were from the New York Times.

3. Choose a Maine company to see what information is available about either the company or its industry. I searched BIW and returned 68 results. The results were from news, government documents, and periodicals. There were many articles updating the reader on things that were happening at BIW, and the governmental connections and opportunities with their business.

Value Line

1. Look at the current issue of Value Line. Explore the various links for the “Investment Survey,” which is the primary tool available to public library users. Start with “Description,” which gives a good description of the site. This provides a great description of what Value Line can do for the consumer. It also gives a general overview of the stock reports they provide.

2. Look at the various reports offered: Ratings and Reports, Selection and Opinion, Summary and Index, etc. Familiarize yourself with the information contained in each report and how they differ.

The Ratings and Reports section gives information about 133 different companies. It offers the company’s name, the ticker for the company, the industry it belongs to, and the timeliness for each company. You can view these reports in either PDF or HTML version. The Selection and Opinion report is a PDF of the updates that have occurred during the week in the stock world. It gives you low risk options and advice on what stocks are worth purchasing and the overall ups and downs in the stock market. The Summary and Index report is a 40 page PDF that is an overall index to current stocks and their ratings, the timeliness ranks of each company, timely stocks, conservative stocks, stocks that are ranked 2, highest yielding stocks, biggest free flow cash generators, the widest discount from book value, etc for individual companies. The Standard Ratings and Report Cover Page is a 2 page index of where to find info on specific companies and it gives the National Income Series information for consumers. The Standard Ratings and Report Supplementary section supplements more detailed information about specific larger companies. 

3. Pick a well-known stock such as Starbucks, General Motors, Apple, etc., and do a company search using either the general search box at the top of the page or “company look up.” Familiarize yourself with the type of information provided by linking to the various tabs at the top of the report. Also look to see if there is a “full research report” available for the company.

I chose Apple, which I found out in the stock world is called AAPL, and it had a full research report which was a one page PDF of detailed Apple stock and company information. The tabs were also very detailed. The Quotes tab revealed the current placement of Apple stock in the stock market. It gives prices and information stock buyers are in need of. The News tab gives the most recent business news about the company from many different business sources. The Option tab gives the most recent price for stocks to bid on or ask and when these prices will expire. The Graph tab, which was foreign to me, seemed to show the stock progress throughout the day. The Time/Sales tab shows 1 minute of bids and asking prices and the market it happened in.

WallStreet Journal

1. Using the advance search feature, look for articles on small business and health care. There were almost 20,000 results.

2. Look at how the results are returned and the suggested limiters offered by the site. What might a small business person be interested in? A small business person looking for health care information might limit their search by looking up small business and health care expenditures so they will understand the costs for providing this type of care. They also might limit it by looking up small business and health care policy so they can find out about health care policies that small business might adopt. Anther limit could be small business and health insurance so they can get an idea of what kinds of insurance small business offer their employees. A fourth limiter could be small business and health care to get a general overview of having insurance in a small business.

3. Familiarize yourself with the options available to follow up on your search, such as creating alerts. Yeah, creating an alert worked for me! It was easy to use and sends the information directly to my e-mail as it becomes available. I was able to name the alert whatever I wanted and could schedule it daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Another option was RSS feed, which created a web address that I could visit to see new articles about my topic. Other options are to save my research on the ProQuest website, e-mail the research list to myself or someone else, print it, get the citing information or export/save it in another form (PDF, HTML, RTF, etc) to view it later.

NoveList Plus and NoveList K-8 Plus

1. How can the view component make your job connecting readers with books easier? The series I chose to search for was the Susan Wiggs’ series. I love her style of writing. She has the ability to captivate me for hours while I am reading. I would use the view component on NoveList Plus or NoveList Plus K-8 to interest adults and kids in other books in a series that they might enjoy. I would choose the detailed view because it shows the student what the book looks like, gives all the important information on how to get it and gives a general overview of what the book is all about. That way they can preview the book that they are interested in reading before they begin reading it. It reminded me a lot of the book orders that my son comes home with because they also give a brief description along with the important book information so they can find it later or before they order it. It is important to be able to preview the book they are choosing to read so they do not spend (waste) a lot of time trying to figure out whether or not they will like the book when they start reading.

2. How can using this tool make your job easier and promote better customer service in your library? I am not a librarian, but I could imagine that having a tool like this will definitely increase my customer service approval and make my job easier if I were a librarian. My patrons would be able to look up their favorite author and find books by other authors with the same writing style. It introduces them to new authors, expands their reading lists and allows the librarian to assist others with other issues while these patrons find books of their liking. The librarian is freed up from having to suggest new reads and the patron is still getting spectacular customer service because they are finding new reads on their own.

3.  How can using NoveList Plus help you to increase awareness of the collection you have worked so hard to build, for both new and older items? Using NoveList Plus can help increase your awareness of the collection you have built because it keeps a record of all the books in a series from beginning to end. As the years go by, the librarian would only have to search up the series to see when new books are added to these collections. It would also show the librarian which series he/she might add if one particular series is real popular with the patrons. This will help them increase their collections and still keep their patrons pleased.

4. I guess I took the question in Question 3 too literal. Other participants answered in ways that they could help their patrons find particular books that their patrons would enjoy reading, where I answered ways that the librarian might use the NoveList Plus to keep their collections complete and up-to-date. I did manage to find one other participant that understood the question like I did. I am feeling better now.

Hobbies and Crafts Reference Center Week 4

1.  I chose two of my favorite hobbies that I never have any time to do. The first was scrapbooking. There are a lot of articles on scrapbooking through a three different periodical choices. My closest library, Lewiston Pubic Library, does not have any of these three choices listed. The second hobby I chose was photography. I love to take pictures, but never time to learn more about my camera and its abilities. There are two periodicals listed on Marvel, Popular Photography and Shutterbug. Popular Photography was one of the periodicals listed for my nearby library so it did have some of the same periodicals, but the hobbies and craft resource center offered more. 

2. I looked at projects for scrapbooking and they were awesome. Two in particular that I would love to try are Chalk Ink Technique Triple Play and Incredible Archival Inks. I love the way they use chalk to create some great background pages in the first project. The second project has ways to create pre-made stamp sayings for your scrapbooking page. I love the way they make the letters so bold and loud. The photography search did not offer any projects, which I thought was too bad. A lot of teachers would be able to use photography projects that they could do with their students or better their photography skills on their own.

3. On the help section I looked up Wildcard and Truncation. This information was very helpful because they will search for information without having to know the exact word you are searching. The wildcard choice allows you to put a ? where you don’t know the letter or correct spelling for a word. If you put the word co?t It will return results for words like coat, cost, colt, etc that have the same letters with the question mark replaced by a different letter. The truncation allows you to put a * on the end of a word so you will get all results for the base of the word. For example, you can write construct* and you will get results for constructed, construction, constructing, etc with the same base word you searched for. I also watched the tutorial on using the Hobbies and Crafts section and that’s where I realized that I could have searched for photography as my hobby, also. The tutorial was very good and showed how to use Boolean and advanced searches.

Maine Newsstand Proquest Discovery Exercise

           The tutorial was very helpful to learn how to navigate through the newsstand search. It was simple and easy to follow and understand. After watching the tutorial, I jumped right into the basic search. I searched for the full text articles about apitherapy (bee venom therapy) first and received 4 results. The newest article was from 2009, but it was still very informative. I noticed that the ones from the same year basically had the same information just through a different writer. My second search, bee venom and arthritis, produced almost the exact same results with the exception of one different article about a beekeeper from New Portland, who used bee venom to treat his aches and pains. I liked the ability to sort the articles from the most to least recent. It made it easier for me to find the latest news about apitherapy.

Saving the search was easy once I made an account. I was able to save my search so I can go back to it later. I was able to preview my articles and print right from the preview page. It was very easy to use. I tried to create an alert, but I was not able to do that. It kept telling me that there was a server error and to contact the tech support if it kept happening, which I did do.

To date I have used the K-12 Britannica Online School Edition and K-2 Britannica Learning Zone. My fourth graders are researching mammals to be able to write a report and we used the Britannica Online School Edition for the Elementary level. The kids had no problem using the site and really enjoyed that it read to them. My teachers, however, were amazed that such a resource was available to us for free. My second graders used the learning zone for their continent research. They were able to watch and learn new facts about each continent and write down those facts. It was easy to use, however, we seemed to have problems using Internet Explorer while watching those videos. My Firefox browser worked great. Next week, they will revisit this topic using the K-12 online school edition. They will be able to easily search the continents within the subcategory of the continent section. Also they will be able to use the speaker and have the entire page of information read to them.