Friday, October 26, 2012

Never thought I'd use this database!

I've never been crafty.  My mother didn't have a sewing machine and I was traumatized by home ec in junior high school.  However, I discovered that I LOVE the Hobbies and Crafts Reference Center.  What a surprise!

I'm a birder, I keep a life list of sorts.  I never go on a trip without my binoculars.  So, of course, I looked at Bird Watching, under Outdoors and Nature.  Needless to say, the EMMC library doesn't subscribe to any of these journals, nor do I.  So it's good to know I can read them here.  There were 50 projects and I'm not inspired to do any of them.  I'm not sure "serious" birders are necessarily the type to do projects (birdhouse switch plate covers?  whimsical garden shower curtain?).

But all was not in vain.  I switched to Cooking, specifically vegetarian, and discovered my favorite magazine, Cooking Light.  I stopped subscribing about 5 years ago in a fit of frugality.  Woo hoo!  I quickly found and saved some great recipes.  Now, I'm a convert.

One thing I don't like about this  (and all of the Ebsco databases in Marvel) is that when you email articles to yourself, they arrive 1 article per email.  I wish they could come all attached to one email.  I looked in the help to see if this was something that could be modified but I don't think it can.  Also, the help section says you can do a "visual search" and has a screen shot but this option does not show up in our database.  Too bad, I wanted to use it in the Bird Watching sub-category.

Monday, October 22, 2012

What's New(s)

This lesson is about Maine Newstand which I have never used.  I do mention the Proquest Newspapers (general) database to med students and new providers because they are coming to Bangor from other parts of the country and I think that maybe they might want to read their local newspaper while they are here.  I also use it as an opportunity to point out MARVEL as a resource.

I did a basic search on Alan White (my husband) because he had a book published this past summer and there have been a few local events and I wondered if any newspapers had picked them up.  The search pulled up 2899 items, 99% of which were what we in the info business call "false drops," nothing to do with my Alan White.  The problem was that I needed to be able to do a phrase search.  So I went into the search tips and discovered that I should search "Alan White."  That worked much better. But there are quite a few Alan Whites (a number of whom appear to be criminals) and no mention of the book.  I did another search on Hosmer Pond in Camden (of interest to me) and saved it.  I discovered that articles can easily be translated into other languages.  Also, when you click for the entire article you get full-text, not pdf which is often not good enough for patrons, at least in my setting.  I don't see any way to search for images.  I tried searching Eastern Maine Medical Center strike and looking for images and couldn't find any and I know there were several in the BDN.  I must be doing something wrong.

I haven't had any occasion to show patrons how to use MARVEL this week.  But, if any of the consultants should read this, I want to say that I think the tutorials on the MSL website are great!  I talked about them at our staff meeting this week and sent out the link to all my staff. 

Thursday, October 11, 2012

All Hail Britannica

I searched for "Obamacare" and it mapped to Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).   Very good.  The initial screen showed only the Encyclopedia entries (not what the Discovery exercise indicated).  I clicked on the Articles tab and got to the articles, then saw the 3 sections as described.  I opened one of the articles but could not find any display of citation style choices.  It's a good thing I don't have to write a paper.  Once I was inside the article content, there was no way back except the browser back button.  Only after going back, could I get to a screen displaying the Academic edition logo.

Not too impressed with this database but I think that is to be expected. 

I have created a workspace and will play around with it.  I could use this to create a fancy handout.  I'll see what I can do.

Now I see I could use the workspace to work on a project.  It would be useful for a collaboration.  I'd like to see an example of this. 

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Playing with the design

                                                                                  Here I am hard at work on the MMI assignment. I'm practicing adding an image.  It's easy, but making it fit into the overall design seems to be the hard part. And the word wrap does really funky things! Looks "right" when composing but not when "live."



Why is this blog called The Real Marvel?

Maybe I'll use one of the Marvel databases to "uncover" the answer to this question (of course, I already know it).

Have never posted in a blog before so I can't wait to see what this looks like.  Just peaked and it's kinda boring.