April 2009 All Wired Up halfway summary

I am in the process of creating five questions for each of the databases I chose [Demographics Now, Gale Directory Library, and Public Records Online].  I have two questions [so far] for Public Records Online, and three for Gale Directory Library; I’m working on some good ones for Demographics Now.  Next week, I am going to email them to Pam for review, and see if she can find the answers!  I’m trying to channel questions I’ve had from patrons in the past or ones that may be asked in the future (pretend you hear an echo-y sound for the word future )

To help me prepare, I took a pre-recorded webinar from Demographics Now about how to search using custom radii or drive times, which is one of the ways you can find information.  Since we have the Library Edition, the presenter showed some searches that we do not have access to.  The webinar was helpful.  I didn’t know you could have only two numbers in the ranges box instead of three.  The presenter also gave a tip that he thought drive times were more accurate than using the radius search.  He did note that the drive time search is calculated for light to moderate traffic not during rush hours (of course!)

I also took a ten minute pre-recorded webinar giving an overview of Demographics Now.  It showed most of the same features the other webinar did, but with less detail.  The presenter mentioned that you can search as low as a tenth of a mile and as far as 100 miles [however, when I chose 100, it gave me an error message saying that it couldn't search more than 32000 square miles].  (I would recommend staff take the custom radii/drive time pre-recorded webinar  rather than this overview one.)

I attended a live webinar on the Gale Directory Library product on Thursday April 2.  I was the only one taking it so it was an one-on-one session!  She did a Basic Search by entity name and noted the check box to include both current and backfile directories.  [However, we have no backfile directories, so that doesn't matter.]  She suggested I take a look and play with the Export List function and the difference between the two options for downloading to an Excel spreadsheet.  She searched Disney (at my suggestion) across all titles to show how a marked list results page puts the entries of the company in order by the directory searched.  We then went into the Advanced Search screens because you can choose to search a specific directory.  The drop down search screens change depending on which directory you choose.  We chose Ward’s, and if you want to get an alphabetical listing of companies, search by name.  Zip code, city and/or state searches are like searching geographically in the print books.  The trainer told me she was going to email me a “cheat sheet” Gale created for searching Ward’s.  The last thing she pointed out was the Infomark button (which is on all Gale products); this makes a persistent link to the search you did or you can bookmark it or email it to colleagues.  She told me that a college library used Infomark’s for a blog the Reference department kept called “The Reference Diary” and they would put the link in for a search they found difficult so others could use it.  The training session was supposed to last an hour but we got through it in thirty minutes.  It was worthwhile for me to take the training.

I did not take any online training for Public Records.  I have been using the product for awhile now.  I looked at the Help button next to the search boxes to re-familiarize myself with search parameters, like how far back I could search the Input date field, etc.

Here are the questions I have made up so far: 

Public Records Online–How far back do the records go for Cook County new homes?  We bought our house in early 2004.  Can you find the record?  I live at 1436 Clinton Avenue in Berwyn.  My name is Lori Preston.  What was the purchase price?  Who was the seller?

Gale Directory Library–How many associations are in Park Ridge, Illinois?  How many nonprofit organizations are in Park Ridge, Illinois?  Are there any publishing companies in Park Ridge, Illinois?

Pam and I haven’t discussed how we want to share this information.  I’m interested in screencasting, but I’m not sure if that would be too long.  I guess, we would have to make three separate screencasts, one for each of the databases, for it to be short.

What I won for finishing All Wired Up!

Thanks to the All Wired Up committee and the Library for the 1GB MP3 player I won!

Step #4: RSS

First, I spent a couple of hours cleaning up my Bloglines account that I created last year.  I noticed some blogs aren’t publishing anymore so I deleted those right away.  I feel like Bloglines is just another place that I’ll have to check.  I like getting the RSS feeds to Outlook, but I forget to check that too!  I was pretty consistent checking My Yahoo page too, but I’ve gotten out of that habit, too.

I read on the Shifted Librarian’s blog (author: Jenny Levine) about a library that let young adults dance their fines away.  It was for a Patron Appreciation Day (which is a cute idea), but I thought Maggie or Children’s could have dance-offs to let “kids” pay off their fines.  The children could bring in cans of food too if they didn’t want to dance.  (http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2008/02/06/dance-your-fines-away.html)

I do like that you can put all the latest news about things you like into one place but then you have to remember to check it!       To use RSS at the library, maybe a department could sign up for one Bloglines account, add certain relevant blogs to it, and then make it part of the continuing education of the department, something like a del.ici.ous account but bookmarking blogs instead of websites.