Friday, January 18, 2008

The Georgia Blue Book

Karen Minton, GALILEO Support Services, sent this announcement : Georgia Official and Statistical Register: "Georgia’s Blue Book," a new resource from the Digital Library of Georgia has been added to the GALILEO demo system and is available for your preview at http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/statregister/.


The Digital Library of Georgia is pleased to announce its newest Web resource: Georgia Official and Statistical Register: “Georgia’s Blue Book.”

The Georgia Official and Statistical Register, published from 1923-1990 by the Georgia Department of Archives and History, is commonly known as the Georgia Blue Book.

The 1989-1990 volume was the last published volume. Considered an important reference work for historical research, the Register covers Georgia’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, providing biographical sketches of elected and other state officials.

Georgia members of U.S. Congress and federal judges are included, as are county officials and regents of the university system.

The Blue Books contain election returns, provide basic reference data on Georgia counties, and cover Georgia miscellany, such as the state flag, state flower, state song, rosters of Georgia governors, and legal holidays.

The Georgia Official and Statistical Register site is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as a part of the Georgia Government Publications program.

The Register is full-text searchable and is available in JPG, PDF and DjVu versions.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Generalities

The ENG 111 instructor likes her students to focus on the ProQuest Databases for their initial foray into research. Her feeling is ProQuest has enough general information that all students should be able to find at least one article on their topic.

It is a learning curve for our students to learn what a database can contain and how to use one.

I like the analogy that databases are like cars- if you can drive a Ford you can drive a Chevy. Cars are cars- steeering wheel, stick shift somewhere, accelerator, brake, etc. It might take a few minutes to get acclimated but a car is a car and you can drive one! The same with databases. They have similar features- basic, advanced searches, limiters.

ProQuest Databases has the Basic, Advanced search tabs, Topics, the Publications tab.

For Eng 111, I show the Basic tab, the Full Text limiter, and the Scholarly Journals limiter.

We're pushing the full text limiter with the thought that our students aren't doing academic research, they need an article for a "report".

I know I waited till it was too late to order articles through InterLibrary Loan when I was an undergrad. The full text limiter eliminates the wailing and gnashing of teeth as they realize there was a perfect article but all they could see was the abstract and it's too late to order.

The Scholarly Journals limiter weeds out the Good Housekeeping articles and begins to help students "see" there is a diference in the writing and content that scholarly journals allow.

It's a step toward Information Literacy- showing the students there are ways to weed through the tsunami of information that is available.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

The awards again

Yesterday, I was so pleased to find a link that noted the American Library Association awards that I forgot to remind you where you can find information about books in GALILEO.

NoveList (an Ebsco database that is not green and blue) has lists, links, suggestions and more for finding the perfect book to read for fun!

To find the Caldecott Medal books:
Select Browse lists
...Best Fiction, Children
......Literary (there are 81 different Literary Children's awards) This years winner is not listed, yet.

The book descriptions have a picture of the cover (most of us do judge a book by its cover).

It's a fascinating database with tools to help you keep track of what you've read!
Test it out. You get the current password to use GALILEO at home from your Georgia librarian.

Monday, January 14, 2008

And the winner is.....

The American Library Association has announced the Award winners (Caldecott, Newbery, etc)!

2008 ALSC Literary and Related Award winners!

In order to post the winning information as expeditiously as possible, we are providing a straight list of 2008 ALSC award winners, including book title, author, and publisher. Additional information, including annotations and book cover images for each award-winning title, will be posted to the individual award pages as soon as possible.