Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Farewell print EB

A fellow librarian shared this link to an article about Encyclopedia Britannica.

Fingers flipping through pages while the eyes scan the columns, till what you're searching for pops out, can be quicker for the researcher trained in using print. A digital search requires that you spell what you're looking for accurately. I would hold races between students and myself to find infornation. I'd use print, they'd use digital. Invariably, I won. Not that I'm smarter but if you can't spell, you can't find digitally.


We do subscribe to the online edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Just this week, I noted I couldn't easily find what I was looking for in the database. We don't have a print set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in our collection for me to compare the ease of finding the information.  We do have a circulating set of World Book. I was able to find 'daylight savings time' in the D volume. Sometimes the print encyclopedia is just what you need for quick answers.


-kss

Monday, March 12, 2012

Springing about

We set the clock ahead one hour so there's 'more' daylight at the end of our day. Why do we do this? How is it 'helpful'?

My initial search in our collection turned up nothing. In a second search, I limited my search to electronic books and selected a random electronic book. A search within the Ebsco electronic book collection pulled up computer books that made reference to Day Light Savings Time in the text. . This is something I tell English literature students to do when searching for information on a single poem. Sometimes information on a particular topic doesn't rate an entire book but is mentioned within a book on a different subject. Anyway, it wasn't the history of Day Light Savings time.

GALILEO has multiple resources I thought might help. My favorite quick answer place did have enough information : daylight-saving time - Credo Reference Topic (click on the continue reading link).

My search in Encyclopedia Britannica did not pull up an article but when I clicked on Standard Time, within that article was a link to Daylight Savings Time. The article was short but informative. I wonder why it didn't come up in the initial search?

The source that had the most information (with resources noted) was Wikipedia. Yes, the bane of instructors existence had the most complete information with sources. Because I have loaded the GALILEO Toolbar, there were purple Find It buttons next to articles that can be found in GALILEO.

I found  answers in 'authoritative' resources but I found the most detail in Wikipedia.

-kss

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