Word arrived that "a new interface for History Reference Center is now available in GALILEO. Users can now browse subjects and popular resources as well as searching for historical topics. To limit to a time period or a Lexile reading level range, click the Advanced Search. "

A trip to History Reference Center through GALILEO pulled up the standard Ebsco search page. A search for Abraham Lincoln revealed a number of articles. Where is the "browse subjects" area? A return to the standard page, a scroll down showed a Timeline box with drop down subjects. I picked the U.S. History - Civil War and reconstruction. Over 10000 articles appeared. So how do I browse? On the left side there's a column. Scroll past 'Refine your results' and keep going. There are the options for subject and publication browsing. Click on the arrows to reveal the options. They call it a 'new interface' but it looks so much like the standard Ebsco interface that it took me awhile to figure out what was 'new'.

-kss

Students may access all Library Resource passwords (including GALILEO) by going to the CTC page http://www.chattahoocheetech.edu
Select Quicklinks (upper right hand corner)
Select Library
Select Find Books
Put in your Student ID# and your Banner password
Select My Account (middle of the gray bar)
Select Off Campus Access link (all the Library Resource passwords are there)

Quoth for Poetry Month

Obviously not my work but struck my fancy.



We do have several Poe works in our collection. Just check the catalog.


-kss

All the news

Just received this bit of news:

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/athnewspapers

The Athens Historic Newspapers Archive now provides access to nine newspaper titles published in Athens from 1827 to 1928. Consisting of over 77,000 newspaper pages, the archive provides historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date. The site will provide users with a view into the history of Athens in its early years as the home to the first state-chartered university in the nation and its eventual growth into the largest city in northeast Georgia.

The archive now includes the following Athens newspaper titles: Athens Herald (1913-1923), Athens Banner-Herald (1923-1928), Southern Whig/Southern Herald (1838-1850), Clarke County Courier (1903-1913), in addition to the titles previously included in the archive: Athenian (1827-1832), Southern Banner (1832-1882), Southern Watchman (1855-1882), Daily/Weekly Banner-Watchman (1882-1889), Daily/Weekly Athens Banner (1889-1922).

The Athens Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of the Georgia HomePLACE initiative. The project is supported with federal LSTA funds administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. Digitization is also made possible through a grant provided by the Francis Wood Wilson Foundation, Inc.

Other newspaper archives available through the Digital Library of Georgia include the Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive (1847-1922), the South Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive (1845-1922), the Macon Telegraph Archive (1826-1908), the Columbus Enquirer Archive (1828-1890), the Milledgeville Historic Newspapers Archive (1808-1920), the Southern Israelite Archive (1929-1986), and the Red and Black Archive (1893-2006). These archives can be accessed at http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/MediaTypes/Newspapers.html

Local newspapers were full of information about the community. If you had any kin in the Athens area during this time period, there is bound to be some bit of family lore that can be gleaned easily.

-kss

Bones dem Bones

To assist the Allied Health students taking Biology 2113, we have created a Library Guide for this class.

Our Library Guides follow a pattern. The opening page offers boxes for the catalog and Galileo along with information about the class. The Book tab has links to new books, electronic books, and our catalog. The articles tab has links to the resources that tie to anatomy like Anatomy TV and Health Reference Center. Each tab has specific information tied to the class.

Let the Library Guides help you get the most out of the library resources for each class and program.

-kss

Current CTC students may get off campus access information by opening My Acount after logging into Find Books.

Twister

The Digital Library of Georgia has pictures and film from the 1936 Tornado that devastated Gainesville, Georgia. A search of the CTC catalog for tornado pulled up 17 titles. It is intriguing to note what gets pulled up with a word search. I did find a Project Gutenberg title A full description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pennsylvania published in 1877.

There are no photographs. The two line drawings complement the words to illustrate what happened. The author describes the path of the storm. The individuals affected by the tornado are quoted. The description of the damage includes an estimate of the monetary loss. There is a list at the end of the 'book' noting the name of the person and the monetary loss.

The comparison between this book and the 1936 Gainesville tornado information is fascinating. This book, even without photos, is personal. You begin to know the people who were affected by the storm.

 A picture may be worth a thousand words but a thousand well chosen words create a picture that can't be duplicated.

-kss

Spring storms

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Every tornado seems like a totally unique event to a community. The pictures and film clips from the 1936 storm are eerily familiar.

The 1936 Gainesville Tornado: Disaster and Recovery provides online access to a historical film depicting the extensive damage from the severe multi-funnel tornado strike that devastated Gainesville, Georgia, on April 6, 1936. The thirty-two-and-a-half minute film, probably shot for insurance purposes, focuses on the devastation of the commercial and governmental center of Gainesville, but also includes footage of damage to nearby residential areas.
 In particular, it features the damage to the public square, the county courthouse, the Georgia Power Company, the Cooper Pants Factory, and the First Methodist Church. The 1936 Gainesville tornado (part of a massive tornado outbreak across the Deep South that also heavily damaged Tupelo, Mississippi) is generally regarded as the fifth deadliest in U.S. history. Extensive recovery efforts involving many local, regional, state, and national resources eventually rebuilt Gainesville, culminating in the 1938 dedication of the new city hall and county courthouse by President Franklin Roosevelt.

The site provides an introductory essay, as well as a multi-media exhibition on the tornado and the extensive recovery effort afterwards. An interactive map offers geographically-based access to selected film clips for which shooting locations have been identified. The site also includes links to related images in Vanishing Georgia and the Hall County Library System Historical Photograph Collection.

The interactive map is very easy to use. It is more for the stranger looking at the devastation, than for a person who had kin in the area. There is no search box. You can't look for a particular person (I didn't see any names listed) nor a particular business (though businesses are tagged in some photos). The pictures are in black and white which lends a seriousness to the display.
The The 1936 Gainesville Tornado: Disaster and Recovery is part of the Digital Library of Georgia. The site is available through GALILEO by selecting Databases A-Z, selecting all databases, it's at the top of the list, 1936 Gainesville Tornado


-kss

Current CTC students may get off campus access information by opening My Acount after logging into Find Books.

Breathing Space

The pollen count is at the ridiculous level in the Atlanta area. Yesterday it was over 9000, today it is over 5000 and we're grateful for the decrease.

Breathing space [electronic resource] : how allergies shape our lives and landscapes by Gregg Mittman offers an intimate portrait of how allergic disease has shaped American culture, landscape, and life. Drawing on environmental, medical, and cultural history and the life stories of people, plants, and insects, Mitman traces how America's changing environment from the late 1800s to the present day has led to the epidemic growth of allergic disease.

The nice thing about this book is, it is available online in both Ebsco and Ebrary. You don't have to go outside and breath the yellow air. Ebsco and ebrary offer downloadable options for many e-readers.

You will need the login to use either vendor off campus. Current CTC students may get the off campus access information by opening My Acount after logging into Find Books.

-kss

Pollen

Red cars look orange, white cars look yellow, black cars look golden. The pollen is settling on everything, changing the color of our world. Why?

Garden, Landscape & Horticulture Index provides access to articles about gardens and plants, including topics such as horticulture, botany, garden and landscape design & history, ecology, plant and garden conservation, garden management, and horticultural therapy. A highlight of the database is its focus on environmentally sustainable horticultural and design practices. This index and abstract product is designed for gardening enthusiasts, professionals, and students of horticulture and of garden and landscape design & history. It covers more than 300 core serial titles that include general gardening titles of national, international, and regional interest, and titles devoted to specialty gardens and plant groups.

The Garden, Landscape & Horticulture Index is not just an index. One can limit the search to full text. There are plenty of articles to be found. A search for 'pollen' pulled up 1500+ articles. Limiting the search to 'pollen management' retrieved 8 article. Admittedly, those eight articles were aimed at the professional horticulturist not the average urban pollen sufferer.

If you neglect to click Full text and find the perfect article but all you can access is the abstract. You may borrow the article from another library by clicking on the purple Find It button. Select the OCLC World Cat link. Click on the hyperlink for the title. Look to the bottom right in teeny tiny print for the 'Borrow/Obtain a copy' link. Fill in the request form. Because you're logged into GALILEO through CTC, the article will be sent to the Marietta campus. You may request that it be sent to your home campus by noting in the comments box where you'd like the article delivered.

Hopefully the rains will come soon to clear the skies.

-kss

The off campus access information is now available to current CTC students through My Account after they login to Find Books.

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

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

CTC students may get the current passwords by logging into our catalog, selecting My Account, and then selecting Off Campus Access.

Do you feel OK?

Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition provides over 500 scholarly full-text journals focusing on nursing, allied health fields, and many medical disciplines. Patient education sheets from the Lexi-PAL Drug Guide are also included.

I went looking for the 'Patient education sheets from the Lexi-PAL Drug Guide'. A simple search for 'patient education sheets' turned up a plethora of articles, none that met my preconceived notion on what a 'patient education sheet' would look like. When I read the words, 'patient education sheets', I think of a pdf, a single sheet handout with illustrations.

The publications link in Health Source lets me search by title, by clicking on the first letter of the title, and by scrolling through the whole list. I selected the letter L, then looked for  Lexi-Pal Drug Guide. There are two issues of the Drug Guide. The results do not match my preconceived notion. The 'patient education sheet' is an html view of an article on the drug. It seems clear and informative. It requires scrolling through multiple screens.

I wonder why they refer to it as a 'patient education sheet'?

-kss

CTC students can get the current password to GALILEO by logging into My Account in the Library catalog and looking at the Off Campus Access link.

Did you vote?

Super Tuesday. Georgia is part of the big primary day. Please do think about your vote and what it may mean to you in the long run.



-kss

Leaping about

An odd day, it only appears on the calendar every four years. Where can I find the how and why we have this extra day?

A scroll through GALILEO turned up an Ebsco science database and Salem Science. I figured one of them might have information about the added day. Neither had the facts I was looking for on 'leap year'.

Encyclopedia Britannica did have an article with facts and suggested resources. It didn't 'feel' like there was enough information.

The best resource for 'leap year' facts has been Credo Reference with articles from an Astronomy reference, a literature reference, and several dictionaries. Credo Reference gave me just what I wanted to know.



-kss

CTC students may get the passwords to all CTC resources by logging into the Find Books My Account and selecting the Off Campus Access link.

I found these resources in GALILEO
I selected Databases A-Z
I selected the first letter of the resource to find it it in GALILEO

Affirmative Action

What does affirmative action mean to you? A random survey showed fifty percent think of race, the civil rights movement and the sixties, when asked about affirmative action. The other fifty percent think of the 90's, gender, sports and Title IX. It seems to depend on the respondents age.

The random survey was inspired by Salem History which has two 'decades' books in the History database - the Forties and the Sixties. The section in the Sixties  on Affirmative Action begins :

The term “affirmative action” first appeared in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which required employers to engage in affirmative action, that is, to voluntarily rehire those who had been fired because they were union members and, in the future, to hire without regard to union membership rather than awaiting lawsuits to enforce the law.

The chapter goes on and refers to "1941 and 1943, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Orders 8802 and 9346, which mandated nondiscrimination by defense contractors, African Americans were hired in record numbers by contracting corporations in a voluntary effort to demonstrate compliance."

Salem History notes sources for this chapter -

For a history of the earliest uses of affirmative action, see Frank W. Andritzky and Joseph G. Andritzky’s “Affirmative Action: The Original Meaning,” Lincoln Law Review (1987), and William B. Gould’s Black Workers in White Unions (1977). Criticisms of affirmative action are expressed in Nathan Glazer’s Affirmative Discrimination (1975) and Stephen L. Carter’s Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (1991). A pro-affirmative action view is presented in Gertrude Ezorsky’s Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action (1991) and Susan Sturm and Lani Guinier’s “The Future of Affirmative Action: Reclaiming the Innovative Ideal,” California Law Review (1996).

Based on the resources used, I wonder if the union issues had to do with African Americans? I hunted around GALILEO searching in WestLaw, Legal Collection, ProQuest, &  Ebsco for Affirmative Action: The Original Meaning. The 1987 reference is too old for the databases we have access to. A search in Google Scholar noted more sources that have cited the 1987 article. A search in World Cat for the Lincoln Law Review revealed I could request a copy of the article through inter-library loan.


Wandering around looking for answers to my own questions can be entertaining.

-kss

What does the picture say?

Historic Architecture and Landscapes of Georgia: The Hubert Bond Owens and John Linley Image Collections at the Owens Library, a joint project between the College of Environment and Design, University of Georgia and the Digital Library of Georgia, contains 1500 images of important and representative architectural sites and landscapes in the state with an emphasis on Athens and Middle Georgia.

The intriguing part of this database is the Teacher Resources (on the left side, 4th link). How do you take the pictures, which are nice but still are just pictures of places I haven't been and have no connection with, and use them as a learning tool? This article, Creating Place Based Classroom Resources suggested that photographs:

Rather than serving merely as illustrations, the visual materials in each lesson are documents that help students achieve the lesson’s objectives. Because analyzing and extracting information from visuals are not necessarily skills students have developed, new lessons now include a Photograph Analysis Worksheet. The worksheet directs students to describe a photo after looking at it briefly and then again after careful examination. They might be surprised at the information they can gather, or at least surmise, about when and where the photo was taken, the reason the photo was taken, etc. Appropriate for analyzing both historical and modern photographs, the worksheet helps students learn how to “read” visual materials.

A picture is worth a thousand words. You do need to know how to read those 'words'. Use the resources available through the Digital Library of Georgia and GALILEO to expand your 'vocabulary'.

-kss

Our view is limited

From our door we see  the wooden wall that separates us from the construction. We hear pounding, sawing , and voices.  We can see workers moving through the doorway carrying debris out. It is a limited view.

A walk outside provides a view through the spaces that have been cut out for spacious windows. We can  see the open space that used to be an auditorium.  The plans we've seen, show the area lined with tables and chairs. The front entry is beginning to take shape. There will be a curved cover over the glass entry. The outdoor patio area  will be a welcoming space.

The contractors have made great progress since October. Rumor has it construction will be complete by April. I haven't heard when in April - just April!

The view from the library will change.

-kss

Subject terms

Ashes, ashes.... What do we have in our collection on Ash Wednesday. A subject search turned up one item. A word or phrase search turned up two items.

The people who catalog materials are extraordinarily detail oriented. They care about the size of the material, the authorship, the publisher, and the contents of the item. I was a bit surprised that Holy Wednesday [electronic resource] : a Nahua drama from early colonial Mexico by Louise M Burkhart has the subject 'Ash Wednesday-Mexico.' Identified only in 1986, the Nahuatl Holy Week play is the earliest known dramatic script in any Native American language. This play deals with the end of Lent (Holy Week) not the beginning (Ash Wednesday). I wonder what the cataloger was thinking?

-kss

Students may access all passwords by going to the CTC page
Select Quicklinks (upper right hand corner)
Select Library
Select Find Books
Put in your 900# and then your Banner password (6 digit birthday)
Select My Account (middle of the gray bar)
Select Off Campus Access link
Scroll down for the electronic book passwords

Ash Wednesday

Have you seen many 'dirty' foreheads today? Christians of the western liturgical churches are having ashes rubbed on their foreheads in the sign of the cross. Why?

Our online reference collection of 587 titles in Credo makes it a cinch to find the answer.

A search for 'ash wednesday' retrieved 235 entries. The left side bar tells you the number of entry types- 69 articles, 52 definitions, 51 events, 32 persons, etc. I wondered how there could be persons referred to by searching for 'ash wednesday'. Skimming through the results, they are poets, authors, actors, politicians, and clergymen who wrote or did something relating to Ash Wednesday.

The children's rhyme "Ring Around the Rosy...ashes, ashes, we all fall down" has been dancing in my head this Ash Wednesday. The poem has nothing to do with the day but it still is sticking in my thoughts. I wondered if Credo Reference would have a literary reference? A straight search for the phrase turned up a wealth of sources but the search engine had pulled individual words from the phrase rather than the whole phrase. A second search with the phrase in quotes only turned up two references. Neither were as informative as Wikipedia, which has 20 footnotes and 5 Reference books cited.

Sometimes you have to use the wild web to get the answer. Just make sure they note their sources!

-kss


Current students may now access all passwords by going to the CTC page
Select Quicklinks (upper right hand corner)
Select Library
Select Find Books
Put in your Student ID # and the Banner password (upper right hand corner)
Select My Account (middle of the gray bar)
Select Off Campus Access link
Scroll to the bottom for the electronic book collections passwords

Found it!

My question was about beads (throws) and Mardi Gras. I searched through four databases in GALILEO and found a history of how Mardi Gras started its rise in New Orleans. There was no mention of the beads.

A search in our catalog for Mardi Gras as a subject did not turn up any titles. A word or phrase search pulled up 15 titles. I looked through several electronic books searching for the word beads. It is so easy to search the electronic books.

I found success with Creating the Big Easy [electronic resource] : New Orleans and the emergence of modern tourism, 1918-1945 by Anthony J. Stanonis. The 5th Chapter, A City that Care Forgot, The Reinvention of New Orleans Mardi Gras, on page 187 contained the tidbit I was looking for. In 1921 the Krewe of Rex started throwing beads! Prior to 1921, Krewe members had blown kisses but not given any tangible items away.

There you go. 90 years of bead throwing started with businessmen trying to get tourists to come, stay, and spend money. It seems to have worked.

-kss

Ebrary does require a login.
Current students may now access all passwords by going to the CTC page http://www.chattahoocheetech.edu
Select Quicklinks (upper right hand corner)
Select Library
Select Find Books
Put in your 900# and then your Banner password (6 digit birthday)
Select My Account (middle of the gray bar)
Select Off Campus Access link
Scroll to the bottom for the electronic book collections passwords.

Throw me something, mister

Viewers along the Mardi Gras parade routes stand with arms raised, shouting for the costumed benefactors on the float, to share the wealth. How did Mardi Gras, as we know it, get started in New Orleans?

A search in multiple GALILEO databases is pretty easy to do. The Search tab (5th tab over) provides steps to complete the search.
- Step 1 Enter search keywords. There are three search boxes with drop down limiters for title, author, subject, etc.
- Step 2 Select Search Options. You have three choices- full text, peer reviewed, and dates. I suggest selecting full text and peer reviewed. Full text to make sure you get the entire article and not an abstract. Peer Reviewed so the articles aren't from People magazine.
- Step 3 Choose Databases to search. Academic Search Complete (Ebsco) and Research Library (Proquest) are the two displayed. There is a Show more databases link that opens a long list of options.

To answer my questions about Mardi Gras,
Step 1. I entered Mardi Gras as a subject search.
Step 2. I limited my search to Full Text. I'm looking for articles with information not acadamic treatises.
Step 3. I added the two Religion databases. Mardi Gras is the last day before the Christian season of Lent.
I clicked on the Search 4 databases button
The results are in date order.
There is a box on the left that tells me Results by Source. Interesting that Ebsco's general database has no articles with Mardi Gras as a subject but Proquest has 596.

The article from ProQuest that shared some early history of Mardi Gras was published in 2002, in the New Orleans magazine, The men who made Mardi Gras. There isn't any information about the bead throwing. I need to go back and look some more. Meanwhile, I can think of the folks lining the streets of New Orleans with arms waving!


-kss