Week 10 - wrap-up

I really enjoyed doing this challenge. The State Library offers so many great resources and I learned from all of the different challenges that we did. I had gone to a class a couple of years ago that was basically the same thing that we did here. I was very excited at that time and did go back to the library with some useful information. I do think I learned more from this because it was a weekly challenge that we had and the opportunity to do the research ourselves over a period of a week or more. It was only myself that went to the seminar before and I'm sure I didn't retain all of the information, but with this challenge we had 5 members of our staff doing this. It was fun to talk about the different things that we all learned as well as different ideas that we had. We have talked about having a program at the library to help patrons learn the about the different resources available to them.

I believe that World book for kids SIRS and Proquest will be great resources for kids doing research for school. I think they are easy to understand and so much information is out there for them. I also liked looking into World Cat for Interlibrary loan research. My favorite was probably the genealogy. Looking at Ancestry one could get lost for hours.

I thank you for taking the time to do this and for your comments and am very glad that I did this even in the chaos that our library was in.

History and Genealogy Resources

In Ancestry Library I searched for my name and at first only came up with one listing at my current address. Everything was correct. When I searched further I did pull up my first address in town. The address, phone number and spouse were correct but had my birthdate as 1979 - a little off as my oldest child was born in 1979. I also searched for my dad. The first listing was in Sioux Falls at an apartment. My mom was listed as his spouse and so was his occupation. These results were from a city directory. This was so much fun to look at. I then looked at both my parents records and could even see the cemetary and their headstones. I also looked up my father-in-law.He was listed the son of the head of household and was listed as an unpaid family worker. How interesting.

When I searched for my grandfather I could see his name and where he was born - Denmark - which I already know but generations down the road could learn a lot. It also listed my grandmother and the names of the 9 children they had. I looked up my other grandfather and could see both his birth and marriage certificate.  I could keep going on for hours and get lost in this.

I found some of the same people I searched for in Heritage Quest as I did in Ancestry. I did look up Vermillion South Dakota and could read about the Harned family from a book. I also looked up Turner County and found a brief history of Viborg SD which is where my grandparents came from with the topic being Danish Americans which is where they were both born. Imagine that.

In Sanborn Maps I looked up Vermillion and found the Court House is still at the same location. I also found a Farm Implement and Shingles business. This has not been here for some time. These were both from a 1923 date. It was quite interesting to see where the end of town was at that time.

ArchiveGrid and CAMIO

ArchiveGrid - When I searched Sitting Bull I learned that he was also known as Tatanka Lyotake and was the leader of the Hunpapa Sioux. He fought against the Crow and was wounded several times. He moved his tribe to Canada until they surrendered to the U.S. Forces. He traveled with Buffalo Bill Cody for a time. He was killed while resisting arrest for abandoning traditions of his people. His autograph card was at Cornell University.

I looked up Turner County South Dakota. One of the entries was Homestead days, co 1959. The contact information is Montana State University, Bozeman Libraries. This was an article about Jessie Howard Duffield born in Iowa. She moved to a homestead near Parker, SD in 1882 with her family and worked on the ranch while attending school. Toward the end of her life she wrote a short essay on her life as a homesteader. "homestead Days" talks about her childhood experiences in South Dakota and the great blizzard of 1887-1888. These are fun stories.

CAMIO - After I typed in Paul Revere, I refined my search by clicking on creator. He make some interesting things including teapots, coffee urns, sugar urns the liberty bowl and sugar bowls.

There are beautiful things to look at in here. It is also nice to see who the creator is, the date, the type of item and where it can be found. Some of the things are quite amazing. They did some very intricate work.

I searched Vincent Van Gogh. I looked at his paintings, drawings and watercolors and his early prints. I pulled up different things and you could look at the beginning date of the work till the end date.

Our patrons could use this resource to look at different works by different artists. They might have a painting and don't know who the artist is and could possibly find it here. I could also see where students could use it for research.

I put in lakes as a subject to see what kind of art I would get. There were 72 different paintings or prints. I choose four different ones and put into my favorites. Fun to look at the differences in a slide show. You could show many different kinds of art work from different time eras. This could be a great extra for your presentation.

WorldCat

When searching in the advanced search tab, when I went over to keyword the drop down menu gave me many choices for searching. I could search by author, title, ISBN, material type, publisher and so on. I played around with this and tried the different ways to search for a book. I have not used WorldCat before so am impressed with all of the search options.

The book I searched was Heir of Novron (an Interlibrary loan request). When I clicked on #1 402 other libraries had the book. The first library listed was Brookings Public followed by Sioux Falls Public. I could not pull up their records for some reason but could pull up other records. The call number was Science Fiction. I found  other books written by this author. It was the 3rd in a trilogy.

In the OAIster database the result I Choose was "Letter from Sinclair Lewis to Marcella Powers, May 14, 1942". This was quite interesting to read It gave me the object which was regarding Lewis' journey through North and South Dakota. I could also browse St Cloud State University's Sinclair Lewis Collection I can see where you could find all kinds of information in this database.

I do Interlibrary Loans in our library & this will be a great place to look when looking for certain books which are not found in South Dakota libraries. I'm excited to try this as it can be frustrating when looking for certain materials.

eBooks on EBSCOhost

1. My search topic was landscaping. The books that came up with in this search had more to do with homebuilding, remodeling, or selling your home. I found that you need to click on full text. When looking at the index I did find 1 chapter that had some information on this subject although the book was published in 1999. I tried a couple of other searches and did not have the best of luck. I will have to play around with this.

2. When looking up  Constitution Day I did get a couple of books relating to this subject, however if I just looked up constitution I think I got better results. I would recommend "AP US History" or The constitution of the United States of America. I found that you really had search through these books to find exactly what you were looking for.

3. In the search on Western history I choose Nebraska. I found a lot of information about Native Americans and the history relating to Native Americans. I also found some history about the plains. Not as much information as I thought there would be.

Gale Virtual Reference Library

There is an amazing number of titles in the GVRL. You can obtain so much information from this site. I choose the Gale Encyclopedia of Cancer, 3rd Ed. This was a 2 volume set. Just looking at the index leads you to areas you might want to research. I searched colon cancer because of family history and found so much information. It was nice to see related articles to research and also newer versions than what we may have in our reference collection. Very up to date information.

When looking up "The adventures of Huckleberry Finn" you could easily find literary criticism. You can also find plot summaries, historical overviews and the different sources. This would be so helpful for students doing research as there is an amazing amount of information to obtain. It was also easy to find what foods contain zinc. This source told me the foods that contain zinc that are easier for the body to absorb and also why we need zinc.

I will recommend this to anyone doing research from middle school students to adults.

Lesson 4 - Proquest

The basic search that I did was on animal cruelty. It was interesting to see how many articles I could find on this subject. There were articles about the laws concerning this subject as well as psychological reasons that this might happen. If you are doing research there are quite a few related subjects to search and depending on your search you can pick your source such as scholarly journals, newspapers or magazines. I also liked that you could sort by relevance. A very good site to find full text articles.

I have enjoyed looking at some of the other posts. I did not look at all of them but checked out a few. You can get more ideas just by looking at these.

When looking at publications, I did a search for Publishers weekly. You can search certain issues and anything from fiction to non-fiction & so on in this publication. If we were missing an issue you would be able to find it here. I just had an ILL request today for a library journal in which our copy was missing. I could have found it here. Nice to know for the future.