Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Lesson 8

Yep. I'm skipping over lesson 7 which has convinced me that I cannot find relevant topics that EBSCO covers. I will come back to it at a later time.
Lesson 8, World Cat.
After clicking the Advanced Search Screen tab on the 2nd toolbar, I searched for Mark Twain. I selected keyword author, defining it to personal name. I wondered if  I would come up empty, since his name is actually Samuel Clemens. Wow. 31,194 records in 2880 libraries world wide. 18,267 in English.
Next I went back and chose the title  search and clicked on the limiter for Books. I searched for Huckleberry Finn. Results:6511 records, 4339 of which are in English. The first item was The Oxford book of American Light Verse by William Harmon. When I clicked on the author I got a list of 91 books. When I clicked on American Poetry in the Descriptor list under the subject heading there were 101498 records, of which 70736 were books. I found the call numbers are LC:PS586 and Dewey:811/.07. 2772 libraries have this book, the top library is Alexander Mitchell Library.
This reminds me that there is a Mark Twain book that I was interested in reading- something about a suitcase? So many books, so little time.
I added OAIster to the databases I searched. Searching with South Dakota as a keyword I found 138225 records in OIAster and 125027 with World Cat. I think this could be valuable site for students needing facts and statistics for debates and speeches.

1 comment:

  1. Hi, Lynda, sorry for your frustration with Lesson 7. Let us know if we can help you! Thanks for your work on Lesson 8. This is a resource that all library workers should know about! WorldCat has a lot to offer. You are right about OAIster being for researchers. I will draw your attention to Lesson 8, Part 3, CAMIO and the Discovery Exercise 3. Try it, you'll like it! Thanks for your work here, Lynda!

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