New Research Guides and Help Finding Journals

If you look to the right of this blog post, you’ll see that the list of Research Guides & More is starting to flush out a bit, and there are more to come, including a Wyoming history research guide for the fourth grade and whatever else you may need for your students.

I have had a few teachers and staff members drop by occasionally looking for help locating journal articles, and so I thought I’d post a few tips in case they are helpful to others. If you would like further help, please don’t hesitate to stop by, and I’d be glad to assist you.

For education, your number one go-to place is ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Education. A growing number of articles in ERIC are available in full-text for free, but if you find one that isn’t but looks useful, we may well be able to locate it for you in a library database.

The library’s Research page is your portal to all our databases. If you are inside the school, you should be able to get to them directly. If you want to search from home, you’ll need your library card number and PIN.

I recommend starting with EBSCO. After clicking on that link, choose “EBSCOHost Web,” and then check the databases you would like to search. Academic Search Elite will have the most articles available full-text. The Teacher Reference Center is an abstract-only database, but again, we may be able to get the full article.

These resources are not all very easy to use, and they often take practice. If you are stuck or frustrated, please let me know — I would be happy to set up appointments with you during your planning periods or whenever else is convenient for you.

In the meantime, though, have a great weekend!

Filed under: Online Research

Updating the Collection: Say Hello to the 21st Century!

Between May and August of this year, thanks to funds from A Gathering of Grizzlies, the Wyoming State Legislature, and Park County Library Foundation we added 594 new books for children and teens to the Meeteetse Branch Library. If you browse through the stacks, you may see that some of the older books you remember are gone, but you should find many shiny, new, up-to-date books in their place.

For instance, we no longer have a book about the presidents published in 1957, but we do have Ann Bausum’s Our Country’s Presidents: All You Need to Know About the Presidents, From George Washington to Barack Obama, a wonderful book about the history of the White House and its inhabitants, with an introduction by historian David McCullough, called Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out, and a new set of biographies of many of our notable presidents (I am sorry, but Millard Fillmore did not make the cut).

We no longer have books that tell you that you can contract HIV from a toilet seat, or that obsessive compulsive disorder is the result of poor toilet training, but we do have two new great health-related series, Rookie Read About Health for kindegarteners through 2nd graders, and the Life Balance series for 5th through 8th graders. Both are correlated to Wyoming standards.

We have new biographies of everyone from Eleanor Roosevelt to John Lennon; books on sports records, books about cars and trucks and things that go; books about the battle of the Alamo and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s; books about . . . well, I could go on and on, but I hope you will stop by and see for yourself. Updating the library is an ongoing process, and we certainly have more work to do, but we’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made so far.

If you have suggestions, ideas, or requests for library materials, please don’t hesitate to tell us!

Filed under: New Books