WorldCat

1.  I searched for the book, "Amazing Greek Myths of Wonder and Blunders" in WorldCat.  This is a new book that I have recently purchased for our school library and I am interested in knowing what call number was given to it in other libraries.  There are 514 libraries worldwide that have this library book.  The first library listed to have this book is Cedar Falls Public Library.  I was not able to click on the link to the Cedar Falls Public Library because the link was not active, so I clicked on the next library listed, COE College.  The call number they gave to this book is PZ7.7 .T76 2010.  When I clicked on the author's name, I saw that this is the only book listed for this author.  Since this book is of the graphic novel format, that might be why one book is listed in WorldCat.  When I clicked on the subject, Mythology, Greek -- Comic books, strips, etc., this book is the only one listed for this subject.  There are 6 books listed for the subject, Mythology, Greek--Drama, and one book listed under the subject, Mythology, Greek--Juvenile fiction, which might be a subject I would be interested in.  I like the format of the full record for this book.  It has the summary about the book and also a Publishers Weekly Review which would be helpful in the book selection process.

I searched for South Dakota in the OAIster database.  There were over 50,000 results that came up for South Dakota.  I first looked at the Mount Rushmore Nighttime Post Card link.  It showed what appears to be an older post card picture of Mount Rushmore.  The date is unknown and the post card is from the Charlotte County History Collections in Florida.  I then clicked on the Explorer of the Northern Plains link.  This aricle is from the Hathi Trust Digital Library and it is the actual article written about the exploration by Lieutenant Gov. Warren's exploration of Nebraska and Dakota in 1855-1857.  The OAIster database seems to be quite extensive, but I am not sure how useful it will be for our middle school students.  The reading level is more academic and I think my students will get frustrated with it.  My gifted ed. class might find this database useful though.

NetLibrary

2. I did a search in full text with Constitution Day in paratheses so it would search for it as one phrase.  I got 21 results in NetLibrary.  The first book that came up, "Representing Popular Sovereignty" appeared to be a good source for information on this day in the U. S.  The rest of the results talked about Constitution days in other countries, so students would need to be careful readers to make sure that they got the right information for their research.

3.  I did an advanced search with "history" as the keyword and "Nebraska" in the publisher box.  I came up with 20 items in my results list.  Several of these ebooks at the Lincoln University of Nebraska Press as the publisher.  The books that I looked at seemed to offer some good history on Nebraska. 

I plan to introduce this resource to my 8th grade gifted ed students next week as a possible resource for their history day projects.  Since this resource definitely contains higher level ebooks, I am anxious to see if they can find the information they need for their history day projects and if they feel comfortable using it.

NetLibrary

1.  I began by watching the videos about the use of NetLibrary, and then set up an acount for the use of NetLibrary.  Thinking of the topics that our History Day students are working on, I did a search for "bay of pigs".  I got 63 ebooks using the fulltext search.  Many of these books would not be helpful to my students, but some might be helpful with their projects.  I also tried a keyword search for "bay of pigs", but did not get any results for that search.  I liked that there is a summary of what is in the books with the search words highlighted.  Also, you can continue your search within the book for your search words by going to the "Continue Search?" on the lefthand side of the screen.

Gale Virtual Reference Library

Our 8th graders will soon be studying the American Civil War, so I decided to look at the history area of Gale Virtual Reference Library.  I then clicked on the History section, and chose American Civil War Reference Library.  This reference resource has five volumes available with a copyright date of 2000.  I looked at the eTable of Contents and chose the American Civil War Timeline.  This timeline would certainly be helpful to our students as they work on their research project and try to keep all Civil War events in the right chronological order.  I then browsed through the eIndex and look at several articles.  I can see that this reference source would be very helpful to our 8th graders for their research project because it provides ample information and illustrations on the different battles and key people of the Civil War.

I tried several different searches in "Basic Search" that had to do with Ancient China since our 6th grade students will start studying that topic this week.  I did three different searches and searched for clay army, Great Wall of China, and the Chinese New Year.  I did not find a whole lot of information for these specific topics, but I did find a lot of information on Ancient China.  Unfortunately, I think the reading level on most of the sources will be too hard for my 6th graders.  Although the Read Speaker feature would be very helpful to those students with a lower reading level.  Also, the translation feature into another language would be great for our ESL students.  Gale Virtual Reference Library is another great resource that the State Library has provided for us, and we are so fortunate to have these services available for our students!

Proquest-Publications Tab

I searched for "School Library Journal" under the Publications tab in Proquest.  It came up as full text with issues available form 1996 to the current year.  I just received my February 2011 issue of School Library Journal in the mail today, so I clicked on that issue in the results list for my search.  The articles from this issue of School Library Journal are all available on Proquest.  I also searched for "school libraries" under the search option found on the right side of screen titled " Find More Documents Like This".  The results came up with many more articles about school libraries.  I think this is a great feature to have if you are looking for a certain topic.

Proquest

I searched for "The Alamo" on the Proquest database because our 8th grade students will start a research project next week on this topic.  I got 452 results in my search.  The first ten results that I looked at were book reviews which would not be helpful for our students with their research project.  I then looked at the results on the next couple of screens, and again I found more book or video reviews and one magazine article that might be helpful.  The rest of the results were not appropriate for our research project.  I then did an advanced search using "Alamo" and "American History" as search terms, but added "not book reviews" as the third search term.  I got 21 results from this search.  Again I found more book and film reviews and not much else for information that would be helpful in the 8th grade research project.  Am I searching incorrectly?  I could see my students would be quickly on Google with this type of results on Proquest.  I have used Proquest in the past, but I always found a lot of book reviews in my results list.  I also think that the reading level might be too advanced for most of our middle school students.  I have encouraged our gifted class to use Proquest for their research projects.