Harper Collins

Here is what some publishers and authors are saying: http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/harpercollins-sets-26-checkout-cap-on-its-library-e-books/

NetLibrary

I did a search on flu and came up with two results:

• Elder: The Amazing Healing Benefits of Elder, the Premier Herbal Remedy for Colds and Flu
• 77 Ways to Beat Colds and Flu

Neither of them made me well. :(

After playing around doing different types of searches on Constitution Day and getting either nothing or way too much I decided to do a keyword search on United States Constitution. I came up with 14 hits, two of which were audio books. All of the 14 would be good books on the subject, but if the student were more interested in the forming and the people involved the two audio books would be what I recommend. The books are:

• James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights by Labunski, Richard E
• Summer of 1787: the Men Who Invented the Constitution by Stewart, David O.

I then moved on to the Western history part of the assignment. After putting only Nebraska in the publisher box on the advanced search page and nothing in any of the other boxes I got 88 hits many of which were good, but... So I tried adding Western history to the keyword surch and got zip. Next I tried adding just western and got only 3 hits, all of them were good but I knew many were missing. When I tried using western in the subject field I got only 2 of the three I had in the keyword search. I then tried adding Western history as a full text search and go 70. Still alot of faults hits. I then picked one of the better general titles and looked at the "Details" where I clicked on all of the subject links listed for the book. I got a message telling me that no books matched that subject and to check my spelling. At this point I am not a happy camper! The book I was doing this with was:From Fort Laramie to Wounded Knee: In the West That Was I then checked another title and found that the subject links worked. Enough!

GVR Using Basic Search

I tried searching on "foods with zink" and got nothing except a suggestion to check my spelling. :( So I tried "foods with zinc" and got the same not helpful result. I suspect a HS student or normal adult off the street would give up at this point. I then tried "zinc in food" and got the same result. I then did zinc in food without the quotes and got 4 hits. The first on the list talked about the types of foods that are good sources of zinc. (Liver -- yum!)

I next did a search on "literary criticism of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and got results that were of no help. Nexted I did a subject search on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and came up with 4 results, 3 of which were literary chriticisms. The fourth was a good overview of slavery that would help a student working on that topic.

GVR By Book

Time to get caught up on this project. I have been sick and distracted with the OverDrive project. (not sick of OD, just really sick for the past week.)

I looked at an article titled "El Niño and La Niña" in  The Gale Encyclopedia of Science. I choose this article because we were talking with the State Climatologist this week and I wanted to get a better understanding of what he was talking about. I was impressed with the scope of the article. I did not realize that there was an actual difference in the ocean levels.

Proquest

I searched for "artificial intellagence" and was impressed that it came back and asked if I meant artificial intelligence. That is a nice feature for people like me who can't spell. :) I continued on looking for information about Jeopardy and Watson. After I found an article I used the box on the right to limit my search to AI and neural networks. I ended up with 529 hits with 8 being from 2011. I was impressed.

When I went looking in other peoples blogs the first one I went to was CHS READS. When I saw that they had looked something up in Booklist I decided to go take a look at Booklist myself. While looking at the "Publication Information" I noticed the tip that they had at the bottom that you could limit to just one publication by using the 

PMID (ProQuest Media Identifier) in your search. For example: mystery and pmid(27576). Doing this search you get 12077 results with the first ones being from the February 1, 2011 issue. This can be useful!

SIRS Researcher

I looked at same-sex marriage and found the articles to be for the most part balanced. I noticed that most of the material was from newspapers and went looking for other sources. I did find some listed but was a bit disapointed that even though one of the sources talked about what the Cathloic Bishops published explaining their stand on the issue that there was not a link or even the text of their statement.

I then went looking at the pathfinders. Which evenutally led me to a piece about Tycho Brahe. I found the short piece to be a good overview of his life.

SIRS Discover

Interesting how some of the articles are mostly fluff and others have lots of information in them. I looked at rattlesnakes for this exersize because when I was a kid living in NM we used to go out to catch them. One article talked about how the venom was being used in cancer research. It would have been a good article except for the fact that the only thing they told you was that the venom was being used in cancer research because it has a similar way of attacking cells and noting more.

The other article gave good discriptions of rattlers and talked alot about the different types. In fact it included a fair amout of information about the different types and their ranges. The fact that it gave a listing of the different types would be very helpful for a kid doing a report. It also had a good picture.