Lesson 5 Gale Virtual Reference Library

Basic Discovery Exercise  #1

Its been about a year since I looked at the title list for GVRL.  I pull it each year to do statistics for access to online books (usually in July since we run a fiscal year here).  Normally I leave it in publication titles descending order but decided to look at in in publication date descending order putting most recent additions at the top.  I'll have to remember the "export" button, didn't notice it before or it is new!

Since the top book was UXL Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes, 2012, I search for Lakota, in all editions.  It returned 17 results with titles like Sioux Nations: Lakota; Great Plains; Sioux Nations: Dakota and Assiniboin.


Exercise #2
I typed Lakota in the search box and got 145 results.  There is a variety of results ranging from the Lakota titles I found above to things about Oglala Lakota college to Sioux Wars to Black Elk. I choose to look at the Sioux Nations: Lakota and listened to the beginning of the article.  I did it via a download because the "listen" part wasn't loading very fast, the mp3 loaded faster. 


Exercise #3

I looked at a couple of comments and it seems like everyone can find something to interest them using Gale Virtual Reference.  I need to remember to use it more often.



Advanced Challenge

#1

Using the book Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of World Holidays, 2000 (I found by puling up the title list and then did a page search for the word "holidays") I did a "search within this publication" for the word spring.  That got me 25 results with countries like China, Iran, Columbia, Spain, Greece, Poland, Israel.  There are also a variety of holidays from New Year to Easter and Karneval to Pascha.  Not all are spring because you need to look at the articles to get the dates but it is a good resource for a start to digging into the list.  The table of contents has a calendar of selected holidays so you can move into the spring months (April, May?  or March, April, May?)  There are 14 listed in March, with 4 listed as March/April.  Then 10 listed for April and 12 for May and 4 listed for May through June with 2 for May through July.

#1a
Traditions seem most easy to find in the Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of World Holidays but limiting to spring was more difficult, it can be done but takes a while, or at least it did for me.


#1b
 Limiting to foods got fewer results but not much clearer choices on where to look first.  I could select various titles by country but that would slow down a search and don't see that students would be encouraged to go this way.  If there is an easier/cleaner way I missed it.  Maybe I'm over thinking (being too much the reference librarian)

#1c
I think one thing that was frustrating me was the results of an overall search were leading to all festivals, not limiting to spring so titles like Thanksgiving and Halloween appeared near the top.  I know there are many good books here, just wasn't happy with my results using spring festivals.  When looking in the Junior Worldmark on World Holidays I decided to select China and found a spring festival called Ching Ming, there is information in this article on food and arts/crafts/games.  Doing it a country or two at a time would get this type of information I'm just not sure if students would search this way.



#2
I looked at UXL American Decades, 2000-2009 and the Chronology part of the Table of Contents caught my eye.  I'm a trivia buff and would love to find this kind of book for the years 1930-1990, it would help a lot with our Nostalgia Night movie series.  People love reading about the year the movie was made and we provide it but by searching the net, this would be great for other years.  For fun I searched for September and found one that happened on my birthday, September 21, "Barbara Walters extends her contract with ABC News and becomes the highest paid broadcast journalist in history.  She receives $12 million annually (2000).  The only one for this decade though.