Week 4 - Hobbies and crafts

Well, this turned out to be an interesting week for me on the Marvel Challenge.  As a Children's Librarian in a public library, especially a librarian with a background that includes art school, I love getting crafty in and about the library. Many odd things that I've made adorn my desk and entice young patrons to come up to see, touch, and discuss them.  Right away I knew exploring the crafts and hobbies of Marvel could be useful and dangerously distracting.

I spent some time looking through the interface and saw a lot of potential for discovery via browsing techniques and was quite pleased by how broad some of the categories seemed to be reaching.  When it came time to search, I decided to limit myself to a project I've had stewing in my mind for a while: Display items of a space/Star Wars theme. Star Wars is one of those never-go-out-of-style topics with my young readers, and I've been thinking for some time of modifying a globe into a death star, or building a few ships to hang above the play area.

I was quite surprised by the near total lack of 'star wars' results when I clicked over to the Projects tab, hoping to find something that might work well with my plans and encountered immediate disappointment. Of the 28 results for Star Wars projects, only one of the results had anything to do with the Lucas classics, and that entry was listed dead last of the 28.

Exploring the help feature I found it to be well laid-out, but as my very first library job was primarily teaching these very databases, I didn't discover how to -do- much that wasnew. What I did discover was that the Hobbies and Crafts databases lets one use an impressive array of search modifiers. Booleans and Expanders are all common enough, but wildcard and especially proximity searches are often overlooked. The visual search was unlike anything I had seen before, but sadly it only seems to exist within the help files, and not as anything actually usable by the public. Oh well.

Week 3

With Halloween rapidly approaching, I find my topics of interest turning to one of my favorite genres: Zombies. While I have a great love for most dystopian fiction I've found that I often enjoy a well-written zombie book, (Or show, I'm hooked on the Walking Dead too.) So I chose that as my subject of search this week.

Of course, as many of you already know, Portland had a bit of undead fun recently when someone changed a roadside sign to warn of zombies ahead, and that was the top hit back on my fulltext search. Other stories told of zombie films being shot here in Maine, zombies playing kickball on the eastern prom, and several efforts to break the world record for the largest performance of the Thriller dance routine.

On a more general note about Marvel, my position in Youth Services rarely gives me the opportunity to educate someone in the wonders of Marvel or the Maine Newstand.. But in my earlier years of a Librarian, when I could be found within the USM system, MARVEL instruction was one of my favorite and most common interactions.

This was approximately six years ago, but at the time many students hadn't yet grasped the advantages of MARVEL's collection of databases. They were thrilled to find that there was a -trustworthy- source that they could search in ways similar to Google.  Often I would get to show how a Google search would lead them to a paywall, and that the university's suite of databases could get them the full text for free. That students could e-mail full text articles to themselves was another tip that brought smiles to their faces. I'm always happy to help people find easier, faster ways to get solid information. MARVEL is one of my favorite tools to show off when I need to help with any sort of research.

Week 2 - Britannica Online

Here we are on week 2 of the Marvel Challenge.  It's worth noting that I can no longer access Ebsco databases with Firefox as my browser. Marvel is kind enough to provide some reset instruction for IE, but trying to follow them in Firefox hasn't helped. Fortunately, Chrome still works just fine for it. If anyone else taking up the challenge knows a workaround, please let me know! Email can reach me at wbrown@falmouth.lib.me.us.

Britannica Public Library Edition
     I did a quick look into the process known as fracking for my assignment this week.  Right off the bat with Britannica through Marvel I was struck by how it returned both articles but also other media, in this case infographics of the process. A very nice touch, particularly for students.
    Another nice touch was translation tools, but here I was struck by two things:  Firstly, that there was a Google Translate option at the bottom, but also a separate option to "Turn on the Spanish translation" a short distance above it.  There's nothing neccessarily wrong with having two translators, but I was taken slightly aback to find notification of even the spanish-only translation was written solely in English. It may be more helpful to include: "Encender el traductor Español"
      
     An unexpected option was the use of 'workspace' to organize projects. Back when I was in library school, I was taking the vast majority of my classwork online and meeting virtually with teachers and other students. These sorts of tools would have been useful for me alone, but invaluable when it came to group projects. 

    The automated citations are also a lovely touch. There have been citation generators on the web for a while, but to have it built into the database is a very nice touch!

Week 1

Well I've set up a new blog for the MARVELous Maine Invitational challenge.  MARVEL has been one of my favorite tools for years now, and I'm thrilled to see it getting more attention. So many people don't realize all the wonderful information available to them through these databases! I look forward to seeing the coming challenges!