Lesson 7: World Cat and More

Today Barrett and I are working on the World Cat.  In our search, we hunted for the book Dino-Baseball, which is one of his favorites and also is in our Gregory Library catalog.  We discovered that 908 libraries have that book.  I had never clicked on the link for the libraries before and I didn't know that they put all the libraries from South Dakota with that holding in the list first.  That was neat!  Brookings Public Library was the first one on the list.  

The class descriptor put it into the Easy Fiction (E) or Juvenile Fiction (LC-PZ).  I know that I have the staff use this class descriptor to classify some of our non-fiction books when they can't find it elsewhere.  This is a great resource tool.

We clicked on the author's name and found out that she had written a book called "Sixteen Cows" which looked really good and like something that our children would like to read.  However, when I looked up the cost of it in hardcover, it was over $100.00.  

Next we looked at the subject: Baseball stories.  There were quite a few books listed but when we looked at the age level, all of them were geared for age 10 and up.  (It was nice that information was available.)  That was too bad.  But we kept hunting for baseball stories and eventually found some Jake Maddox books about a variety of sports, including baseball.  So we are adding them to our wish list! 

I had some difficulty accessing the OIAster database, but that's because I wasn't following directions.  My fault!  I did check out another student's blog and figured out where my error was.  Thanks for the help, Kathy! 

So I put South Dakota in the subject field and the first thing that popped up in the list was "Flood Tracking Chart for North Dakota" ....?

Then I clicked on a title called "Children Playing in Snow", which I thought would be cool as the author was Laura Kinsloe Photographs.  However, when I clicked on the first three access links, the URL was not found.  The host was Amistad Research Center, so I went to the site for that and it was a support site for African-American civil rights.  Not at all what I was looking for when I started out!

So I backed out of that and chose something that I figured might have better results (but not of much interest to me!):   "Sweet Clover in Great Plains Farming"  (although it looks pretty when flowering!)

and I was able to access the full text of the document (and enlarge it so I could read it, which was great!)

I would like to spend some more time working with the databases.  I had used this tool (as stated before) for classification purposes and also for interlibrary loans that I could not access in South Dakota.  However, I did not know how to use the databases, so that was interesting to learn a new resource that can be accessed in the World Cat.