Yesterday, while the Mock Senate was taking place in the Library's Main Room, I decided to upload some of the MARC cataloging records for magazines and journals from EBSCOhost to our library catalog (home access/school access). It's turned out to be a more exhilarating and complicated process than I had anticipated.

I had already uploaded the records from Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center (a Gale product which we've had for a number of years). There weren't very many of them since I had only downloaded those for periodicals with full text. I was able to quickly check the records to make sure they were compatible with ones already in the catalog.

I had downloaded the records from the Advanced Placement Source database the previous week and they were just waiting on my desktop to be uploaded to the catalog. I knew there were thousands of them because I had looked at the lists which EBSCO makes available from its website. I was concerned that they not overwhelm the approximately 35,000 records in my catalog. About 30,000 of those records are for books, the rest are for audiovisual items, websites, other electronic resources, print periodicals, pamphlet files, maps, etc.

Anyway I decided to take the plunge and went through the fairly simple process of importing the records into the catalog. In the end I believe just over 2,000 record were added to the catalog through this process. In the long run I think this is a great addition to the catalog because each record has a link which lead directly to the particular periodical in the Advanced Placement Source database. In other words, if I want to see Atlantic Monthly, I just click on the link which says "Available on EBSCOhost" and I'm instantly taken to a list of all the issues available (back to 1985).

Now, of course, most of the periodicals imported into the catalog are a good deal more esoteric than Atlantic Monthly. How about the IBM journal of research and development? Or The International journal of African historical studies or APMIS acta pathologica, microbiologica et immunologica Scandinavica?

My next task is to go in a clean up the records, many of which come with multilingual subject headings and other anomalous fields. I started editing an alphabetical list and was able to get through the As, the Bs and most of the Cs, by end of today.

In the long run I think this will really enhance the usefulness of the OPAC by giving access to such resources as seventeen law reviews, scores of scientific and medical research journals, dozens of literary journals, and many other periodicals published all across the world. This access should enhance our application for the International Baccalaureate program and help our Advanced Placement and other students find good, reliable, accessible sources of information for all the creative research projects their teachers challenge them with every day.

How to Write a Good Essay podcasts from a Uni in Wales

The latest post on the Information Literacy Weblog, is part of a continuing report from the LILAC 2008 conference held recently in the UK (Liverpool, Mar. 17-19). One section referred to a series of podcasts produced by the radio station at the University of Cardiff in Wales called "Student Survival Guide To Writing A Good Essay." The six shows are well-produced and professional in quality. They include interviews with university students about their experiences with writing reports (locating sources, procrastination, etc.) as well as comments from librarians, professors, counselors and other students about ways to overcome the obstacles to producing a good paper.
Worth a glance and even worth sharing with your students (even though the accents are a bit foreign to our cosmopolitan, digital natives!)

Thanks to Dangerously Irrelevant: Nathan Lowell

Thanks to Ted Brown, a social studies teacher at Redwood, I was recently introduced to Dangerously Irrelevant, a wonderful blog out of CASTLE, the Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education. (What a concept--technologically trained administrators!) That blog in turn lead me to these three videos by Nathan Lowell. They are well worth taking a look at.







Wonderful, provocative videos for those of us engaged in the educational endeavor.

Amazon Wish List Widget

I was just able to add a widget for an Amazon Wish List to my library news blog.

In order to do it, of course you have have an Amazon account which can be made public. Since I have two separate accounts, one personal and one for school, I was able to designate which one I wanted made public.

Once you've gone through the steps there is a place on the Wish List page which allows you to share your wish list in various ways. I chose to use a widget since I'm still not set up to email all my parents, students, etc. (I'll do that eventually as well).
I put the widget on the news blog because that made the most sense to me and I don't really have room for it on my main page at this point. However, I was able to put a button on the page which links to the wish list. I also found the code for the button on the Amazon's Wish List page.

I also posted an article in the parent newsletter recently (you can find it on the news blog as well) which explains several ways parents (anyone viewing at the website) can contribute to the library. It includes buying through Amazon Associates account, a new product called GiftLit, and a link to our local independent bookstore.

Check it out. You may find it useful.

Where in the World Has Tom Been?

I've been using TripAdvisor for some time but recently found TravelPod which uses Google Maps to document where you've been in your travels. I'm just glad it doesn't open another website that I'd need to log into. One of the on-going issues with all my social networking sites is that they don't necessarily "play well together."
Anyway if you got down the right column of this blog you will eventually reach the map. Clicking on it will take yuou to a site where I've entered all the places I've ever been (365 and counting!) and places I want to go. Give it a look--it's kinda fun. I'm at my folks in Glendale, CA, right now typing this on Christmas Eve. That's kinda neat also.
On the topic of not playing well with each other, I've done a lot of Simpy-ing and would like to start doing more del.ici.ous tagging but I don't want to re-invent what I've already done--any suggestions?

New wiki

I'm serving on the local arrangements committee for the IASL conference to be held next summer at UC Berkeley. The committee met last Saturday and decided a great use of Web 2.0 technology would be to set up a wiki where we could share our ongoing planning. I set one up on PBwiki, which I find pretty easy to use and have used before. Now it's up to the members of the planning group to go ahead and take advantage of the power of the wiki to share our planning tasks. If you'd like to get involved contact me.

A Book Is a Book Is a Book?

Fascinating discussion on See Also about the definition of "book" which really makes one think about the notion and how it's (might be) changing.
I do agree that a book as a physical object is very different from any electronic or digital version. As the article and comments imply, we're nowhere near the perfect e-book reader/format.
It also raises the issue of how we teach kids about the beauty and value of the printed word. I'm afraid I don't take a lot of time doing that and get distracted by the need for information over the need to interact with the physical thing which is the book. Maybe this year I can figure out better ways to help my students and staff really appreciate books for their own sake as well as for the information and entertainment they contain.