Lesson 7 EBooks on EbscoHost

I never found the Visual Search box, though I looked in EBSCO Webhost, Student Research Center, Searchasaurus, and Kids Search. I did try several graphics search box options in Searchasaurus and Kids Search, and they were attractive and worked quickly, but I didn’t find what I wanted. I was looking for information on growing kitchen herbs. I would like to start some indoors now, and move them outside in a few months. I found dozens of articles on medicinal uses for herbs, but nothing on growing them came from searching “herbs,” “garden herbs,” or “growing herbs.”

While searching in Kids Search, the second hit I got for “growing herbs” was titled, “Long-term ecological and biodiversity monitoring in the western Himalaya using satellite remote sensing.” Here are the first two sentences of the abstract: “The IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) described the Himalayan Region as data-deficient in terms of climate monitoring. This is a serious impediment to global research initiatives and thus necessitates long-term ecological monitoring (LTEM) across the Himalaya.” This is confusing to me: the colorful graphics and the designation of “Middle School and Elementary” on the homepage made me think I’d get articles suitable for middle school students. Perhaps, the sites vary by appearance only, but all tap into the same article database.

Here is a quotation from an article I got when I searched “South Dakota” in Kids Search:  “Paying farmers to quit plowing marginal, erodible lands was a strategy conceived under the Reagan administration mostly as a means of stalling overproduction.” There were some articles that would fit my students’ reading levels, but it’s too much to sort through. I can see that there are lots of good resources at EBSCO, but I’ll stick with SIRS Discoverer and the Discovering Collection for research in my building. This is too frustrating to use with students.

For the second question, I went to EBSCO Webhost and clicked until I got a search box. I entered “fairy tales” and scrolled through the results list until I came to The Violet Fairy by Andrew Lang. The copyright date seems reasonable for my grandmother to have enjoyed it, and the cover of the book is one color (though not violet.) Next I checked The Blue Fairy, also by Andrew Lang, but the cover had a picture on it. I took the question to mean that every book cover was a different color, but maybe it means each book was about a differently colored fairy. If that’s the case, I think I’ve found the correct series. I also found The Yellow Fairy and The Red Fairy, all by Andrew Lang. I searched for “Andrew Lang” to confirm I had found all the colored fairy titles, and I had.

I went back to search for the Kathy Ross books. I loved these books, and found them to be as charming and encouraging as I remembered them. I’m thrilled that we have free access to them, and now that my schools are encouraging ebook use, I think I will be better able to blend using the SDSL Online books into students’ and teachers’ minds as a reasonable option. We can barely afford a basic collection of craft books, but making crafts is a tremendous learning experience for children.

With ebooks, marketing and promoting titles is developing into our biggest challenge. If I can get people into a database, then they’ll nose around and find what they need in it plus discover things they didn’t know they wanted. I’m envisioning a floor-to-ceiling list of selected SDSL resources with some cover picture prints and pictures of what kinds of information kids can access at the site – a Chilton cover for 1996 Mustangs; some words written in Arabic, Japanese, and Italian by the Mango site; the cover for Crafts to Make in the Spring by the EBSCO site; a portrait of William Shakespeare next to the WB Student edition, etc. Does the SDSL have any promotional materials or ideas about how we can advertise the online resources?