Week 11 – We Have Arrived :)

Congrats to everyone who completed the Invitational. While it is always challenging to fit professional development in one’s schedule, this was a helpful program and the continuity/discipline required to keep up with the weekly exercises (or attempt to keep up as I went along) is also beneficial. Keeps it top-of-mind.

I think my biggest discovery was a tie between health resources and hobby/crafts resources.

While Medline Plus isn’t part of Marvel, it’s so incredibly useful, and the Health Source – Consumer Edition has so much instructive information for patrons. With an aging population and more people concerned with eating well than in the past (or so it seems), we tend to get a lot of questions that can be answered here. It’s not always about just handing a customer (or requesting via interloan) a book or magazine. Many times, the information in Marvel will be more focused, perhaps more relevant, and often more up-to-date than what we have on our shelves. This is what we do, we deliver information. We need to remember, practice, and in some cases learn how to make accessing Marvel a straightforward exercise for our patrons. The better we are at searching ourselves, the more we can convince patrons that the effort invested (in learning how to search) is worth it, when you see the wealth of resources to which they have access.

In that vein (pun intended), I am going to make more effort in incorporating Health databases (and MARVEL, in general, of course) when responding to a patron’s question, or another thought is to always find a way to tie online resources into program content we deliver (whether we are running an adult program on Medicare or container gardening!)

In terms of the Hobbies & Crafts database, this was truly very new to me, and it’s such a fun exploration exercise that we can easily create little flyers or handouts that encourage people to dip their toe in the water. From scrapbooking to jewelry making, almost everyone I know is into ‘something’ and it’s no different with our patrons. This is a great resource to help develop one’s hobby or introduce folks to something new! Plus it’s a good way to find program ideas for kids.

Next year, I would like to attempt to develop a resource related to the business resources in MARVEL for our advocates and stakeholders too, those in local government, Councilors and local business owners, among others.  What a great way to enhance their knowledge of our value, right? We all need to be more proactive in this area. While I respond to the City Clerk and Council members with requests for information, we need to make sure we convey the added value to all the individuals that are decision-makers in our communities and schools, especially those who still think this is the library of their childhood.  We are currently running individual tours for Council members through McArthur Library, and I will make a point to remember MARVEL is the ‘invisible’ collection that truly rounds out our shelves and encourage them to learn how to use the databases.

Thanks to Stephanie, Mamie and Valerie for coordinating the MMI. Well done, all!

The EBSCO Family

I chose to use Masterfile Premier for the first Discovery Exercise. While I have used it before, never hurts to keep up the practice since it definitely is the most comprehensive database for public libraries in terms of popular magazines.  First magazine title that popped into my head was ‘Psychology Today’ and sure enough, that is in there!

I searched on the words ‘health’ and ‘food’ in the publications list and saw quite a few, so I chose to follow the recommended search, and look for info on zinc content and food. While many of the results were focused on international zinc deficiencies and fairly technical studies, I was able to find a short concise list in an Environmental Nutrition newsletter article on building immunity. That’s one of the benefits and drawbacks of a database so comprehensive; one can really find a wide range of authoritative content, and of course the more we use the database, the more we are familiar with the publications within, so we can jump to something that is relevant to the audience: in this case a patron seemingly looking for general information to get started. Read a few blog posts and commented here and there – and moooving on…

I often forget that NetLibrary became Ebsco eBooks, so this was a good reminder to get back into this database. I did change to a keyword search, and looked for topics that ranged from the Red Sox to textile mills to typography. Interestingly, in the latter two searches, there were more than I thought, but they tended to be published in the late 90s, nothing more recent than that and they were fairly generic, not specific to the content I was imagining. The one book about the Red Sox was about the 1948 pennant race. Maybe save that one to read over the holidays… Switching to a broader topic (nutrition), I found an interesting book from U of Chicago press published in 2012 called Fear of Food. So they are definitely updating this on a regular basis with new titles, that’s good to know. Was starting to think that the prevalence of eBooks published in 1999 and 2000 and contained in the database was more than just an odd anomaly that I came across, but I guess not.

As many times as I varied my Constitution Day searches, the Historical Dictionary of Taiwan was almost always on my list. I’m really not sure why….but I’m not recommending that title today. I figured I would drop the ‘day’ and add ‘united states’ and did find a Project Gutenberg book on the Bill of Rights that may be useful for students getting ready for everyone’s favorite holiday … oh, the gifts! the food! the quill pens!! We really need to learn how to celebrate this one better. I wonder what the Amazon Gold Box specials will be that day…anyway, I digress 🙂

Using words like September, ratification, and “founding fathers” didn’t seem to help too much.  Just going with ‘constitution’ and ‘history’ and ‘united states’ though, the search yielded Founding Friendship: Washington, Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, which looked like a promising title; it was in use so I couldn’t explore it unfortunately. I found another title called Representing Popular Sovereignty: The Constitution in American Political Culture. Another one to add to the list. Not a huge number of titles found, but a good resource when needing to broaden searches after more common options have been mined.

With the Western History search, using the publisher field and Nebraska or Oklahoma, my search yielded 81 results … the first one is… Bipolar Disorder? Interesting. Even in the citation info for this title, I couldn’t find any reference to Oklahoma or Nebraska. Not sure how that ended up there, but I trust the system and press on. A few titles down, we have a Field Guide to Oklahoma Prehistory – now that will be  useful! Agrarian Socialism, Indian Gaming, and Bison Hunting…ah, now we are getting somewhere.  I like that twist – use the Publisher field…okay, never would have thought of that but will have to remember it! Useful. Makes sense that University Presses (which seem to be well-represented in this database) would publish historical titles about their own states.

Building the search and collecting contents in the folder as I go is a helpful way to move through a long list like this. Still intrigued with the bipolar hit, I went back and made sure I didn’t have the ‘search the full text of articles’ option enabled, and I did not. Searching that book for those terms, I found a list of state services and resources (by state) at the end of the book. So I’m still not sure why the Publisher field picked that title up.  The mysteries of algorithms and cataloging, I suppose!

That’s it for this post! Carry On, My Wayward Son. Sorry, Nebraska and Oklahoma just made me think of Kansas.

 

 

 

Express Train

So every time I explore Learning Express, I find something I hadn’t noticed before. It’s a very rich collection of classes, tutorials, and so on. The skills improvement, college prep, and career choices alone are lengthy lists full of options. There are so many different opportunities for promoting this resource to students at vocational schools, colleges, and obviously high school and elementary. Literally ‘something for everyone’. Ready to be an Air Traffic Controller? Cosmetologist? Check and check.

I took a CLEP Humanities Practice Test, and after the first 10 questions, scored it. I was surprised at how well I did, as well as with the quality of the test, the speed of the results processing, and the results/score page itself. Seriously, though – I didn’t know Revolt of the Beavers was an actual play; I thought I was guessing the ‘crazy’ answer that is always on the multiple choice list.  I liked how it gave a breakdown of my score both in quantitative as well as qualitative description, the latter explaining how the scores were converted to the appropriate scale. The whole experience was very straightforward and easy to navigate.

For Job Search and Workplace skills, I added The Complete Professional to My Center and opened it (it was an ebook format). Rather lengthy comprehensive book of 192 pages. The file management section alone was worth reviewing, although it made me feel disorganized. All in all, a great resource, and one of so many in this section. It’s great having a pdf so I can print chapters if I like, scroll around from chapter to chapter based on the headings that interest me. There was no assessment tool per se, but I think many of the workplace skills courses are structured in this format.

I also explored a Business Writing / Business Formats course.  This would be great college prep or work prep for young adults, real skills that no one ever teaches you in life – how to write an agenda, structure an email, as well as draft instructions, letters, memos, proposals, reports.  This functions as reading comprehension as well, since it would often give you the instructions in a paragraph, and then say ‘okay now structure that as an agenda on this blank sheet and save it’. Interesting format for an ecourse.

I liked the ‘Just the Facts’ section at the end, as that summarized the key points, and would be suitable for someone with a different learning style or limited timeframe in which to glean the most salient points of the course.

I used the search box to look for courses or ebooks on the topic of meetings and was led back to the Complete Professional ebook that I had looked at before. Search results on the term ‘organization’, while not exactly yielding the kind of course I hoped for, did not generate an overwhelming number of results. Because it picked up on the word ‘organization’ in the description of the course, obviously it gave me everything from the Border Patrol Exam ebook to an ebook on Visual Writing (as well as many other results under the categories of Tests and Courses.  I opened them both – why not, right?

While I was more interested in Visual Writing, I found the Border Patrol exam a useful resource because it included an introduction to the occupation, key phone #s and general industry facts; hence the exams could be a useful occupational handbook even if someone wasn’t quite ready to take the exam.

All in all, a wealth of material useful for all librarians to stay on top of, as I’m sure it’s being updated from time to time.

Ancestry / Week 8

While I have used Ancestry before, and having access to it is an enormous benefit to librarians and genealogists alike, it’s always the proverbial ‘rabbit hole’! So easy to kill a few hours with Ancestry!

Some of my family members have spent much more time than I have, doing genealogical research, building ‘histories’ and creating trees. When I have searched on my name and birth year in the past (and again this time), I usually can spot myself pretty quickly with Public Records as the source data. I explored photographs, newspapers, directories etc as well as a few other categories, and kept refining the search to eliminate impostor Jeffs, but I don’t show up very much in there – I guess I have lived off the grid successfully 🙂

It is interesting to me that I do not show up in any yearbooks (that I could find anyway), nor any directories beyond Massachusetts public directories (where I grew up) since I have lived in NY, PA, MD, NJ, and now Maine. Then again, there are 25,000+ results (which baffles me a bit, since I am specific and enter a lot of information about myself, but it seems to yield so much on other Cabrals). As was mentioned in one of the 3 tutorials I watched, you never know – perhaps there are connections in the other files or search records. Given that I am just dipping a toe in the water, I don’t think I’ll explore all 25k records just right this moment.

Oh right, just remembered about tweaking the default settings – okay, I restricted to exact matches only, and lo and behold, zero good matches for me in any directories. Interesting. I guess they are busy loading ship manifests from 1877. That’s okay, that’s more important than finding out the name of the street I lived on in Philadelphia. For now anyway. Hope my grand-kids can find me. By then, maybe I will have done something interesting 🙂

My fishing expedition for information about my grandmother yielded a pretty quick hit in the Social Security Master Index (of death records) which gave me her exact birth year (I was off by a few) and her birth date, as well as Social Security #.  I wonder if identity thieves have caught onto this yet…oh well, I digress.

She was born in 1898, and died when I was 11. These were exact dates I was able to find, but I wasn’t able to find out any more about her, even using her maiden name. If I had more time, I could have tried putting in other place-names of towns/cities she lived in.

I was not sure if we were supposed to choose the Atlases option or the Photos option under ‘Photos & Maps’ so I chose Pictures and searched with ‘Maine’ as the keyword. Obviously the Advanced Search would have been the way to go here – I had 1.2 million search results, everything from ships called ‘Maine’ to people with the last name ‘Maine’, those who lived on ‘Maine’ Street. And so on. So yes, I have some refining to do! Found a great baseball card though, of Del Bissonette, a Brooklyn Dodger from Winthrop who played in the 30s. Huh. Who knew that Ancestry had a Professional Baseball Players collection dating back to 1876. Crazy! And fun!

I have used Sanborn Maps at McArthur Library before,  and they are incredibly useful and popular with history buffs and researchers alike. I am not sure where to access Heritage Quest (as mentioned in the Marvelous Maine Invitational blog posting), so for now, that wraps up this week (well, last week’s assignment).  More later with Learning Express.

 

 

Week 7 Health Resources

While I have used Health Source – Consumer Edition before, I do not believe I have ever clicked on the Publications link. It’s overwhelming how many publications are in the database; it’s a very rich collection with a wide assortment of specialties, focus, and audience, while obviously remaining targeted to the layperson with magazines like Psychology Today and Scientific American. Relevant as well as authoritative. I did a search on autism and not surprisingly, came up with quite a few hits. Sorting them by date, I chose a brief article about a new medication dubbed ‘The Autism Pill’. It was from Scientific American, and definitely was written in terms I could understand, i.e. a distinct lack of medical jargon, or at least, when words like idiopathic, neurotransmitters, or glutamate were used, they were explained succinctly. I did try the ‘Listen’ option to see how the audio version sounded, but it kept stopping every few words for some reason, so had to revert to plain ol’ readin’.

It is a very useful reminder that Medline and Medline Plus are very different, and that Medline Plus can be accessed freely on the internet.  On the day I searched, the news column listed stories on how the rate of diabetes in children could be on the rise, reduction of smoking in teens in the US and information about soy-rich diets that would be useful for menopausal women.  The popular searches ranged from aspirin to cholera to tuberculosis.

After clicking on the Drugs and Supplements tab, I looked up Coumadin (Warfarin) and related blood-thinning drugs; this was the first one to pop into my mind since my Mom takes Coumadin. There is definitely a wide range of useful information, from basic overviews to the latest news, contraindications and nutritional information to be aware of when taking the drug, videos, clinical trials news, and patient handouts. Extremely useful and easy to navigate.

Under Health Topics, searching on autism yielded very comprehensive results; it’s helpful that everything is already organized by sub-topic running down the page. The info was different from the EBSCO database insofar as in MedLine Plus, there was a wider range of material for multiple audiences rather than just articles that arise from a keyword search. MedLine Plus included overviews and patient handouts for the layperson as well as a fair amount of research; not surprisingly NIH was the source of many studies here. MedLine Plus is extremely useful for families of individuals (as well as the individuals themselves) who have just been diagnosed with a condition. It’s a great place to start in order to get a better handle on what one can expect from a medical diagnosis.

Before I could watch the video, I had to download latest version of QuickTime first though; that’s a good reminder that we need that on public access computers.  Will finish updating here after I have watched a video (preferably a non-invasive surgery video or something innocuous like a video on blinking!)

Okay, back again after watching this short and simple video, and an eye-opening one it was too! (Wow, that was baaaad.) The video was better than my pun, very simple and straightforward, easy to understand, and with captions.  If I am ever so inclined to watch surgery videos, I certainly know where to go, since there are so many of them here!

That wraps up my foray into this week’s assignment (albeit a bit late), and I will catch up on Monday when I’m back in the Library and can access Ancestry, always a fun diversion!

Business Reference Sources

1. In my first search, using Business Source Complete, I thought the range of resources delivered in the search was great – everything from industry and trade magazines to professional journals, magazines, and official registers. It’s great to have all the ‘dross’ weeded out for you, so you can have a more targeted results list. I personally found the Visual Search a bit overwhelming, as there was definitely some overlap, and many of the same key terms were in each vertical list as I moved from left to right, narrowing my results, so it really comes down to how you decide to craft your narrowing strategy.  With a broad topic like FM Radio, though, it could be helpful if someone knew exactly what they were looking for.

 
2. With EconLit, the search for resources for small business owners yielded fewer results than I thought, and I’m not sure how practical or recent the material was, but then again, playing with the search terms one way or another yielded more 2012 hits as I continued to search. Having the ‘Source Types’ is helpful to try to narrow down the type of content, in order to try to find the right material for the audience. The EPA search delivered no results that I could find, but when I used the acronym EPA instead, I found one with a keyword search. Doing a subject = environment search using keywords ‘small business’ was a bit more fruitful. I also just tried doing a subject search and then refining results by subject, but was surprised not to see ‘small business’ as a subject option for me to narrow it by. Similarly, the tax policy search yielded a small number of disparate results, the second hit being an article related to Sweden.  I’m not sure that EconLit would be the first place I would start if doing business research for a customer.

 
3. Using Regional Business News, I searched for information about Target. Since the business is also a common word in many business stories, I had better luck refining the results using su=target but then ‘target marketing’ came up quite a bit. It was easy enough to find the list on the side to refine my search to ‘Target Corp.’ Having so many states listed in the possible subjects made it easy enough to find a few articles about developments with Target stores in NH, although no results for Maine came up.   I searched on 2 Biddeford businesses which have been in the news lately, Sterling Rope and Hyperlite Mountain Gear, but struck out. When I searched su=LL Bean, I was surprised to see zero results, but I used the Smart Text Searching to see if that would work, and that did improve the results but only to 12 articles. I feel like there should have been more, but then again, it really depends on the business for which you are trying to find articles.

 
4. Very worthwhile to get into Value Line and have a play around in that very complicated sandbox. I have had limited opportunity or need to look at Value Line, so it was definitely an education. The PDF view for GOOG (Google) was an in-depth summary/snapshot of the stock’s performance – amazing detail, even more so because I could read it all without a magnifying glass 🙂 I looked for the full research report option for PG (Procter & Gamble), Apple, and Google. While it was clear the PDF option is different than the HTML option, it wasn’t clear to me which is which and what they are called or what ‘types’ of reports I would get by clicking on the PDF or HTML icons. The HTML content was different (although included some of what was in the PDF) and seemed longer and said ‘Custom Report’, so I’m guessing the HTML is more comprehensive rather than just a different view. I don’t know…confusing. I’m not sure what the ‘tabs at the top of the report’ refers to exactly, as it was outlined in the exercise on the MMI blog.

 
5. I did the WSJ search a few different ways, using subjects as well as keywords – the ProQuest bar graph is always helpful in taking me to the 2012 articles, not to mention it’s interesting to see how the media coverage has ebbed and flowed over the past couple of decades, really peaking in 2010. Using further suggested subjects i.e. policy vs expenditure, and so on – this could be a helpful way to further clarify the search for a small business owner who we are helping as a reference customer. Clearly, the delimiting options of document type, document title, date, whether the article is available as full text, etc are all very useful and these would be some of the most popular options – relevancy, recency, authoritative source – all the hallmarks of a good reference search are there so we can help select the right information for the right customer.  I have set up alerts and RSS feeds through ProQuest before and these are relatively straightforward.
Whew – now I’m going to do some research on Byer so I can find one of their hammocks and take a nap!

As a postscript, I tried the Gale Business Insights/Essentials database and found that had some cool features – like comparing companies on one chart by various performance metrics. Interesting!

 

As a 2nd postscript, I cannot for the life of me understand how people ‘rave’ about WordPress as a means to build your site. This has to be the worst blogging tool I have ever used. It never works in Internet Explorer, is impossible to navigate, and refuses to save formatting changes I make until the 5th try. Such a PITA. This has been an instructive exercise for me, if only to convince me that I will never migrate a website to the WordPress platform.

 

Connections and RA

The MSL tutorial on NoveList Plus was a concise and easy overview.  Diving in…

I searched for the Clockwork Century series, and because I didn’t use quotes, there were several hits but the ‘right’ one I had in mind was helpfully listed first.  I can see how the ‘view’ option could be useful, for instance, if a customer thought they knew the name of the series but wasn’t sure (often, series names are misnomers, and what we/anyone ‘thinks’ the series is or should be called isn’t the official name), then I could call up the ‘grid’ view and have the customer look at the screen and see at-a-glance if she recognized the cover images, and more would fit on a screen without having to scroll too far. Obviously, like with any other view toggle option, it’s nice to be able to see more on one list by enabling ‘brief’ vs. detailed, as well.
Clearly, having author readalikes to recommend is incredibly helpful to us in providing better service – whether using NoveList or teaching a customer how to use NoveList, being able to customize a search by appeal factors, see short blurbs about the similarities between authors, and print a ‘take-away’ list to hand a customer are just three of of the helpful tools that can connect a reader with a previously unread title or unfamiliar author. Very helpful in linking the right book for the right reader 🙂  The Toolbox is very handy and instructive. I could see how this could be useful in a number of ways:

a) sharing feature articles or genre lists with customers to promote books in our collection that may be older titles but still ‘fit’ within their reader profile, or emailing targeted NextReads newsletters to customers who we know are interested in particular genres;

b) opening our own eyes to titles in our collection (or titles we need to purchase to backfill series) that we may have forgotten about or don’t necessarily think about as being part of a genre because that author has been typecast – ie Grisham writes more than legal/courtroom thrillers, for instance or Baldacci may appeal to readers who love ‘political’ plots and not just ‘thrillers’, in other words helping a reader put a ‘name’ to what it is she likes;

c) utilizing the Book Discussion Guides to breathe new life into old classics by having them be part of our Book Group recommendations lists or by using the selections as part of our own Book Group discussions.
Also, there were plenty of book display ideas and suggestions for promoting NoveList, not to mention the RA newsletter; we could encourage our customers to subscribe.  My only criticism is that it was a bit difficult to see the ‘Create a new account’ when clicking on My NoveList; also, in the help section, I tried to determine what having a ‘My NoveList’ account would do for me, and it took some time before I found the benefits under ‘Personal Account’. In fact, when I searched on the term “My NoveList” inside quotes, it delivered zero results. Off to read the blog posts of other Minerva Maineiacs now…

Week 4 Kobolds, Pez, Hops and…Model Railroader?

Honestly, I hadn’t really explored Hobbies and Crafts at all before, so this was pretty eye-opening.  Great variety, fairly easy to get around within the resource.  I chose Electronics & Games and then explored a few subcategories, but my experience colored my opinion. Some of the browsing I did revealed some classic ‘turn-offs’ with database usage, whether it’s a librarian or customer doing the browsing: 1) lack of timeliness – way too many old citations – do I want to read articles from 2005 about electronic (??) games (they’re called video games, let’s say it together); 2) bias towards some particular periodicals i.e. why does Kobold Quarterly come up so many times in the electronic games subcategories? Moreover, why does it come up at all when so many of the articles relate to table-top RPG or board games?  Does no one that works at these massive information aggregators like EBSCO even DO searches? It took me 30 seconds to realize this is not a great database, at least for gamers.  Spend 30 seconds, EBSCO folk, and figure out what’s wrong.

Following that search, I browsed ‘collecting’ category and decided – hey, PEZ!  I’m easily distracted – to look up PEZ dispenser collecting. Okay, I see some articles on PEZ, the ‘hobby profile’ tab feature is nice since it gives you a broad overview article…Okay, I can work with this…wait a minute. What the? The first article in the list is from Machine Knitting Monthly and has patterns for knitting baby sweaters. Um.  Either I don’t get it, or their Boolean logic is pretty abysmal.

Our library does indeed have some of the titles that come up in the ‘find’ box, but there are SO many hobby and craft newsletters and periodicals that we definitely do not have them all, so this database is a nice supplementary resource…if it worked, or should I say, if its predictive logic worked. If I just wipe out everything that pre-populates the Find box, and do my own searching, then it works much better.

It took me some time to find a category with a project tab that interested me, but then I settled on Home Brewing within the Home category.  The projects tab led me to an article about a community home-brew garden, (who wouldn’t want to grow their own hops?!) and down the rabbit hole I went. Okay, okay. I give in. It’s a pretty fun and packed database; in some way, it functions as a Wikipedia for hobbies – good broad articles, gives you excellent background in topics you (or a customer) may not know anything about.  Inclusion of videos is a neat feature.

I do think that whatever code or programming selects the hobby profile ‘feature’ article should be updated, because it led me to articles that were 5 or more years old in many cases.  Moreover, there is still something wrong with a database that shows me ‘Model Railroader’ on the Periodicals tab when I’m in the Home Brewing category. That’s just … off…somehow.  Unless its consumer behavior predictive algorithm is showing me ‘Hobbies You Might Also Like to Try After Brewing Beer’ 🙂 Probably not a good idea to operate machinery while imbibing.

The Help section was pretty comprehensive, and covered everything from how to set the preferences (in terms of the way I view results) through to what a ‘Visual Search’ was. I never saw this tab come up, but it sounded like an interesting feature. I just went back into Help to try to figure out how to explain a visual search (or map of past searches) better in this blog post, but couldn’t get in and received an error message saying the server was down.  Oh technology, you vex me so.

Week 3 Maine Newsstand

Maine Newsstand has some highly useful features – the search works well, I was surprised at the high % of hits with full text, and the bar graph on the side was very helpful in seeing the media coverage of an issue I looked up, as it varied over time.  It’s great that you can click on one year in the bar graph as a way of delimiting results. Many other helpful choices to narrow search results by too…and the Advanced Search is well thought out in terms of layout and content. The Obituary Search feature is helpful and straightforward.  I had never created a ‘My Research’ account so that was useful. Saving the search proved to be very easy, as did accessing it later.  In terms of patron experiences, I have truly enjoyed watching the reaction from patrons when showing them Ancestry – if they’ve never seen it before, they respond to me as if I were an alchemist. Showing them images of ship manifests, etc and all the rich resources within Ancestry defines what a true ‘aha’ moment looks like.

And the MSL tutorial on Maine Newsstand was very helpful, as are they all (that sounded like awkward English…)
Okay, off now to comment on Sam’s blog about manatees!

Browsing Britannica

So I have done a bit of searching with Britannica from time to time, and to be honest, I have never been that enthused about how they group results and the sheer dearth (in my opinion) of the resulting content. So I was a bit skeptical when I read that we should search about a current affair. To me, I wouldn’t turn to an encyclopedia first for that, but I’m willing to suspend disbelief and try. After putting in about 5 of what I would consider ‘current affairs’, I am pretty confident in my earlier assumptions.  For instance, the supply of electricity in California is a major issue at the moment, but I turned up very little on this.

In terms of the search algorithm, it is obviously looking for something that I don’t have or can’t offer. When I put in ‘campaign 2012’ I get 166 Britannica articles, 0 concise, and 0 media as well as 0 websites. Really Britannica? Nothing in the media nor websites about anyone campaigning this year? Huh. I wonder what all the hullaballoo on TV is about then. That’s the kind of search experience that turns me off – because it sounds so promising and helpful…and then, well…it isn’t.

I couldn’t spot any reference to a Google Translator service; only an offer to incorporate Britannica into my Google searches. No thanks, unfortunately. My Google searches will only be diluted, methinks.

Some of the research tools could be useful, but more for browsing rather than searching. I thought the World Atlas would be helpful, until I saw how slowly it responded and it fed me information about South Australia (which is a state, not a country) after I clicked on New Zealand (which is a country and not part of Australia nor South Australia).

The bright spots were definitely tools like world data snapshot pages, the easy-to-use Spanish-English dictionary, and the Gateway to the Classics. I could see great value in all of those for helping patrons quickly. I just hope I remember they’re part of Britannica when I need them! Comparing countries with the tool provided was interesting, although I’m not sure when I would use it or when a student would need it – maybe I will keep in mind when deciding whether I am moving to Croatia or Brazil…

In terms of historical or factual information ‘of the day’, I think those are interesting features, and I may consider using them, for example, if I was helping someone who was in search of a topic to research or just for creative inspiration.  It would be nice if more patrons wandered up and said ‘tell me something interesting to go look at for an hour or so, I have time to kill and I have a hankering for learnin’ so please be my muse…’ but that hasn’t happened to me since…well…never.

An interesting and mixed review for Britannica. I think I still would look to Britannica for specialty niche facts, overviews of topics (if you can figure out how to search for them) or individuals, but not necessarily ‘timely’ information – then again, maybe I just need to play more to uncover the gems and learn how to search it better – maybe it’s updated more often than I think!