Hobbies and Crafts Reference Center

Normally I  would be scrambling to do my assignment sometime on Saturday but no delays on this one!!  A person could spend the whole week exploring something new in this section every day.  I started with watching the tutorial.  I was unable to get sound again but this time I tried switching from Chrome to Internet Explorer and the sound worked fine.  These brief tutorials do an excellent job of introducing the resources.

I picked the category of Needlecrafts and Textiles and the subcategory of Knitting.  I then refined the search to look for a pattern for a baby hat.  I had a young girl from the high school ask me the other day if I'd be willing to knit a purple baby hat for a project that she's working on and I figured this was a good chance to look for a pattern.  It also gave me a chance to try out the folder feature so that I could save the pattern that I found.  While I was in the Knitting mode I used the advanced search to narrow the results to videos and watched a video on how to change yarn colors.

After checking out some of the other features available, I switched to a search for Cross Stitch.  Found a lot of patterns labeled incorrectly in that section.  Plastic canvas/needlepoint projecst were included in the Cross Stitch category but they are a totally different type of needlework.  I also found some cross stitch patterns that were labeled as Easy that were actually anything but!!  Will definitely have to explore the section further as counted cross stitch is a favorite of mine.

Our library doesn't subscribe to any craft or hobby magazines so we didn't have any of the ones that showed up in my searches.  As far as projects go, I'd need to retire from my job to even begin to have the time to do all the projects I'd like to do - and I just barely scratched the surface of all that's available!!!

I didn't spend a lot of time in the help section but it looked quite comprehensive and I could see myself using the section on searching to improve my ability to use the right search terms to find what I'm looking for.

Maine Newsstand

My homework assignment tonight didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped.  I started with trying to watch the tutorial "Maine Resources in Marvel" and couldn't get any sound!  Tried with my limited skills to figure out what was wrong with no luck.
I then moved on to doing a couple of searches.  I started with the library, curious how many of my press releases would show up.  I got fewer hits than I would have expected but did find a few from several years ago that I saved in My Research - my first attempt at saving something didn't seem to work but the next two did quite easily.  I also tried to set up an alert so I could keep track of future press releases but ran into my second snag of the evening when it said I had a server error. A few more attempts gave me the same message.
The second search I tried was on gun control. Lots of hits there so it was nice to be able to change the sort to newest to oldest or several other choices.  Tried an alert on that as well so that my husband could keep informed but still got the server error.  Will try again another day to see if it was just a glitch - also possible that it doesn't like Chrome for a search engine.
Checked out the Cite feature - lots of options for different citation styles - would be very useful for students working on research projects.
Aside from the couple of problems I had, Maine Newsstands seems pretty user friendly and easy to work with for searches.  I'm not crazy about having yet another user name and password to remember but I do like the My Research aspect so I guess it's worth it!!

Exploring Britannica

I feel like I'm back in college waiting until the last minute to do my homework!  As I tried to think of a current event that I wanted to search on Britannica, I realized that I know very little about what's going on in the world - we don't get TV reception and I rarely read the paper.  Anyway an article on Yahoo caught my eye "Bizarre looking oarfish washes ashore on Cabo San Lucas Beach" so I decided to check out oarfish.  Found a nice basic short article and then some more scientific ones.  The only thing I found a little difficult was that it wasn't always easy to find where oarfish were specifically mentioned in the articles.  Britannica did touch on the fact that oarfish have been mistaken for sea serpents and/or sea monsters of myth which had been mentioned in the Yahoo article.  Liked the fact that you have a lot of options once you find something you're interested in, like Save to Workspace, Print, Email, Cite, etc.  Being able to double click on a word to get a definition is pretty cool.  Loved the translation feature - fun to look at the different languages and it could be very helpful for people who read English as a second language.

Lots to choose from in the research tools - seemed fairly easy to navigate and get back to the home page.  Had to check out quotes by subject for books.
Emily Dickinson, “There is no Frigate like a Book”   
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry.

I like This Day in History - for public libraries, this kind of info, and the quotes, etc. can be informative and fun to use on social media websites like Facebook.

Britannica Public Library Edition is definitely a great resource that we are very fortunate to have free access to!

Getting Started

I've decided that the most difficult thing about blogging so far was coming up with a name.  I tried to come up with something alliterative to go with 1ibrarylady and thought of 1ibrarylady's literary bites but wasn't sure that anything I had to write would be that literary so I went with location and settled on Downeast 1ibrarylady.  I'm looking forward to learning about Marvel through this process.  Having attended workshops in the past, I know a little but have never really taken the time to explore the resources.  Now I will have to!!

I thought the introductory tutorials were very well done - simple and to the point - containing just the right information to make it easy to get started using Marvel.  I tried the One Search afterwards for "Steuben, Maine" and was impressed with the 7.983 results.   Spotted a couple right away that were for Steuben or Maine and not Steuben, Maine so I tried doing the search with quotes - that narrowed it a lot but eliminated all the articles, etc. that didn't use both words but were about Steuben so I went back to the original search.

Once you have all the results for a search it's nice that you can narrow them in several different way - for example to only newspaper articles or books, etc.  You can narrow the search to certain dates, subjects, or languages as well.  Just marvelous!!