Jackson County Library Services


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SOLIC News Vol. 12 No. 1, May 2002

The bimonthly newsletter of the Southern Oregon Libraries Information Cooperative providing reference assistance for Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson, Josephine, Klamath, Lake, and Lane counties.

413 West Main Street
Medford, Oregon 97501
Phone: 1-800-866-9047
Fax: 1-800-564-6817
E-mail: solic@jcls.org

SOLIC News is written by Jackson County Library Reference Librarians and produced by the Library's Business Office. JCLS is a regional reference center for Oregon Reference LINK.

The newsletter is published with funds granted by the Oregon State Library under the Library Services and Technology Act.

Inside...

Bartleby pg. 2
Internet Book Lists pg. 3
The Sixties pg. 3
Q & A pg. 3
Book Review pg. 4
April’s Other Event pg. 5
Calendar pg. 5
Internet Training Tool, pg. 5
Tips for Web Searching pg. 6
Google pg. 7
OLA/WLA Reviews pg. 8

New SOLIC Coordinator and SOLIC news editor

I was introduced to you in the September 2001 issue of SOLIC News as the new Librarian I at the Medford branch of Jackson County Library Services. My name is Anne Gruel and I am now the SOLIC Coordinator and newsletter editor.

You may remember me as the librarian who was just returning from living in Bolivia for two years. In the last seven months I have readjusted to U.S. culture and have settled in comfortably to the Rogue Valley and to JCLS. As one of my coworkers said to me the other day, “You’ve only been here half a year? It feels like you’ve been here forever!” I’ll take that as a compliment.

I look forward to talking with those of you I already know in my new role as coordinator. I hope to meet many more of you soon as I attend conferences in the state and travel out to visit your libraries. I invite your correspondence and welcome your questions and thoughts about SOLIC and our services.

--Anne Gruel
agruel@jcls.org

New Reference Librarian at JCLS

Greetings. I am Lori Moore, the new Librarian II at the Medford branch of JCLS. I’ll be splitting my time between the Children’s Department and Adult Reference.

I received a B.S. in English from Southern Oregon University and my MLIS from San Jose State University. Originally from San Francisco, I’ve spent most of my life in the Rogue Valley. After spending the last two years in San Jose, I am truly ecstatic to be back in beautiful Oregon!

My experience includes working at Target, the Pacific Nonprofit Network Grantsmanship Library, the Community Education Program at SOU, and the Career Center Library at San Jose State. I’ve also had some pretty odd jobs ranging from working on an organic farm, to waitressing in a retirement home, to making Orange Juliuses. I hope my varied experience will be an asset to JCLS and to SOLIC.

Speaking of jobs, I’ve collected some general Web sites that might help our patrons in their job searches:

America’s Job Bank www.ajb.dni.us
Developed by the U.S. Department of Labor in partnership with the states and private sector organizations, America’s Job Bank offers nationwide, free job searching and resume posting.

OLMIS (Oregon Labor Market Information System) www.olmis.org
Visit this excellent site from the Oregon Employment Department for a wealth of information on living and working in Oregon. The site includes job postings from employment departments around the state.

America’s Career Infonet www.acinet.org/acinet/
Another site from the U.S. Department of Labor, America’s Career Infonet covers employment trends and labor markets state by state. Try the “Employability Checkup” under the “Career Tools” tab for a customized look at employment trends in one’s own job field and geographic area.

--Lori Moore

Bartleby, The Web Site

Question:
Where on the Web can you find the complete works of Shakespeare; a searchable King James Bible; the literacy rate in Namibia; a huge quotations database (more than 86,000 entries); T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; the original Fannie Farmer cookbook; and a printable full-page diagram of the bones of the human hand- all on one gracefully organized and easily navigable Web site?

Answer:
bartleby.com - - a librarian’s treasure trove that also happens to be one of the best excuses you will ever come across to waste a Sunday afternoon on line.

If you’ve never been to Bartleby, by all means go. If you haven’t been there recently, it might be time to stop by and renew your acquaintance. The oldest free digital library on the Web has been steadily improving its already sterling product. As of today, Bartleby’s proprietary database holds more than 370,000 pages of data - - reference materials, classic fiction and nonfiction, and one of the largest full-text collections of poetry available anywhere, all thoroughly hyperlinked and completely searchable via perhaps the best front-end interface you will ever not notice you are using.

Bartleby-named for the protagonist of Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (a “scrivener,” or copyist, was a sort of 19th-century human Xerox machine) - - got its start as a personal experiment in electronic publishing in 1993. Its first e-text, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, went on line in 1994. From that modest start it has grown to include:

All 70 volumes of the Harvard Classics-fiction and nonfiction. This includes Darwin’s Origin of Species and Voyage of the Beagle, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Plutarch’s Lives, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and dozens of other well known and not-so-well-known works.

The complete texts of classic reference works such as Gray’s Anatomy, The Golden Bough, Bullfinch’s Mythology, Robert’s Rules of Order, and Brewer’s Dictionary of the Phrase and Fable.

Current editions of The Columbia Encyclopedia, The Columbia Gazetteer, The American Heritage Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, and The World Fact Book.

The Oxford Shakespeare.
Major selections from numerous poets, including four complete books of poetry by Robert Frost, three each by Siegfried Sassoon and William Butler Yeats, two by D. H. Lawrence, and the entire outputs of John Keats, Rupert Brooke, John Milton, and Emily Dickinson.

...and on, and on.

The texts are cleanly laid out, and they load very quickly; most include all illustrations. All are completely searchable via a simple, intuitive interface which is redundant in the best sense of the word, meaning that there is almost always more than one way to do any given task. Do you prefer navigating via tabs, drop-down boxes, or annotated, hyperlinked indexes? You can use any of these, here. Would you rather search the whole site; search a subset which includes just specific types of works (reference, fiction, nonfiction, verse); or search only a specific work? Your wish is Bartleby’s command.

This is the Web as it is always reputed to be but seldom actually is. Pay the Scrivener a visit, you are likely to find yourself calling on his expertise often.

-Bill Ashworth

"Internet Book Lists and Resources for Readers" now available on JCLS Web site

When we published "Internet Resources for Readers" in the May 2001 issue of SOLIC News, many of you in the SOLIC audience asked when it would be available online. Well, the wait is now over; we've revised and expanded the list of helpful Internet links to readers' advisory sites and uploaded them to our new improved Web site, at www.jcls.org/netread.html. This page is "one-stop shopping" for all your readers' advisory needs- - online booksellers, literary criticism and book reviews, a pseudonym site, Oprah's Book Club, genre fiction-you name it. Bookmark it today!

You may want to peruse JCLS's updated Web site (same address, www.jcls.org, new look.) We've added easy-to-navigate drop-down menus to every page and greatly expanded the Reader's Services section. Check out our great booklists with a local focus, under "Suggested Reads".

And, as mentioned in the March 2002 issue of SOLIC News, you can now search back issues of SOLIC News in a section of our Web site hidden to the general public, by going directly to www.jcls.org/solic/solicarchive.html.

If you have other ideas for things we should make available on the SOLIC portion of the Web site, just let us know. E-mail solic@jcls.org with your comments or suggestions.

--Christine Perkins

The Sixties: Are You Experienced?

Say you need a picture of the original Woodstock poster? Current contact information for Wavy Gravy? The full text of the Black Panther Party Platform? A Sixties chronology, bibliography, filmography, or syllabus? Whether you're helping a patron with a school project or just a Sixties Survivor looking for a hit of nostalgia, here are some resources to relish:

The Sixties: www.etsu.edu/cas/history/sixties.htm. This site from the History department of East Tennessee State University has a great bunch of links, and groovy graphics. The links are not annotated, so you’ll just have to start clicking, but it’s a good place to begin your sixties searching.

The Sixties Project: lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties. This site is notable for its Primary Document Archive which includes the full text of the Students for a Democratic Society's (SDS) Port Huron Statement, the Black Panther Party Platform, SNCC's Founding Statement, and the Free Speech Movement’s infamous "Do Not Fold, Bend, Mutilate, or Spindle", among others. This site also contains Vietnam War information, Sixties syllabi from various colleges and universities, and a Sixties button and poster collection. Unfortunately the site has not been updated since 1999.

The Psychedelic Sixties: www.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/sixties. Here you'll find everything from the mission statement of San Francisco's underground newspaper The Oracle - -"To judo the tabloid low price anguish propaganda and profit form to confront its readers with a rainbow of beauty and words ringing with truth and transcendence" - - to serious articles on Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman as 19th-century precursors of the hippie movement. The site was developed by the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia Library.

Sixties.com: www.sixties.com. At this site dedicated to the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco, you’ll find biographies and photos of hippie notables, sometimes with current contact information. The site also includes articles on famous hippie landmarks like the Fillmore and photo archives of Sixties San Francisco by photographer Gene Anthony.

Baby Boomer Headquarters: www.bbhq.com/. Here you’ll find the Woodstock poster, a Sixties chronology illustrated by famous photographs, song lyrics, a list of prime-time TV shows that aired in the Sixties, and more. Trivia extraordinaire!

--Meghan O’Flaherty

Q & A

Q. A patron wanted plans for building a “Steam Cabinet” - - the kind a person can sit in with his or her head sticking out the top.

A. By using several magazine indexes and the Internet, we identified possible synonyms for this device such as “Sauna Cabinet,” “Sauna Steam Cabinet,” and “Steam Bath.” We also found out that a “Steam Cabinet” is the name of something used for sanitizing food and dishware. We were reminded here to be flexible in our search terms, and to sort through our results carefully. We found one commercial Web site that had a decent diagram of a “Sauna Steam Cabinet,” but the company wanted to sell their product, not provide free, do-it-yourself plans. We were surprised that some of our old standbys like the How to Do it Index, The Backwoods Home Index, and The Mother Earth News Index did not yield results. Our answer came from a combination of Internet and print resources.

Mikkel Aaland had written a book in 1978 called Sweat: The Illustrated History and Description of the Finnish Sauna, Russian Bania, Islamic Hammam, Japanese Mushi-Buro, Mexican Temescal, and American Indian and Eskimo Sweat Lodge. The book has long been out of print, but Aaland has a Web site where he offers to sell reprints of the plans that were included in his book for $20. He mentions that one plan available in the book was for a “Private Sweat-Bathing Cubicle.” We looked the book up in OCLC and found it was available from a handful of libraries. Why not Interlibrary Loan the book for a few dollars instead of order the plan for $20? In this case, the Internet actually served as an index to this book, as there was no mention of the Sweat-Bathing Cubicle in the title, subject headings, or notes of the OCLC record.

Q. A kid whose family had lost all their possessions in a fire wanted to build a low-cost scooter or go-cart.

A. We have a pretty good plans file at JCLS with all kinds of plans for do-it-yourself projects. We made the patron a copy of a plan for a non-motorized go-cart, but the plans were complicated and required many parts and tools. On the Internet we found all kinds of plans for go-karts, soap-box cars, and scooters. All of them used expensive metal or wood parts, and many of them required welding. Another look in our own library catalog revealed a book in our Children’s department from the 70s called Skateboards, Seat-Boards, and Scooterboards You Can Make. Here were easy-to-follow directions for something a kid could make out of scrap wood using a hammer and screwdriver. Never throw away your old technology or craft books because they often contain irreplaceable information!

Book Review

The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine
Kristine Krapp and Jacqueline L. Lone, editors.
Gale Group, 2001

As I am sure most of you know from your patron enquiries, all types of alternative medicine are becoming more and more popular. There is a vast amount of information on alternative medicine, or complementary medicine as it is sometimes called, available on the Internet and elsewhere. Health information tends to vary greatly in accuracy and reliability: Finding reliable, authoritative resources for alternative medicine is crucial. Gale is a reliable name in print resources. They have recently published, and we have recently purchased, The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine.

This four-volume set is well written and avoids jargon (and there is just as much jargon in the alternative-medicine field as there is in allopathic medicine), which makes it easy for the layperson to use. Arrangement is alphabetical with many cross references. Entries tend to be two to four pages long and provide detailed explanations, with sidebars for term definitions and a brief list of resources at the end of each entry. I looked up several subjects with which I am familiar and several with which I am completely unfamiliar (my usual tactic for encyclopedias), and found the information clear, unbiased, and easy to understand. I also appreciated that each entry for a medical condition included a section on allopathic as well as alternative treatments. Volume Four includes a very extensive index and a list of associations to contact for further information about specific types of therapies.

The main drawback to this set is its price: $350. If you have the money, it would be a great resource. It would also make a good memorial for a patron who was interested in alternative medicine. --Jan Gorden

April’s Other Big Event

Many people dread April because it is tax time. This year, thousands (millions!?) anxiously awaited April for a very good reason - - it was the release date for the 1930 Census microfilm. Medford Reference has ordered all reels for the state of Oregon. Unfortunately, our state was not one of the twelve states (all east of the Mississippi River) for which a Soundex was created. This makes looking for a specific person, or people, much harder, unless the Enumeration District (ED) is known. To help discover the ED, Medford Reference also ordered the microfilm reel for 1930 of Census Descriptions of Geographic Subdivisions and Enumeration Districts, 1830-1950 (Roll 83 of microfilm publication T1224). This reel includes Oklahoma and Oregon, and is arranged alphabetically by county. The county is then broken down by city. Each numerical ED is given, along with a description of what geographical feature are included (cities, streets). The place names and street names are from the 1930s, so an historical map or old city directories are useful.

The Soundex system was created in the 1930s, a WPA project for the new Social Security Administration, to identify people who would become eligible for old-age benefits. They started with the 1880 census, but because of many misspellings, the National Archives devised a way of indexing using the sounds in the surname. There are a number of resources on how to use the Soundex, in print and online. One place I check for genealogy information is Ancestry.com, because their Publications section has a free searchable archive of their articles and columns. The articles are usually three to five pages long and easy to read and understand.

For those who want to do online census searching, Ancestry.com and Heritage Quest have scanned all Federal census images and make them available for searching to their paid subscribers. As soon as the 1930 film is available, they will begin scanning those images. Ancestry has also started indexing the 1920 census, and have a few states done already. I have been seeing notices that Heritage Quest has an offer for a free 30-day trial for libraries. Proquest recently acquired Heritage Quest and plans to merge the Heritage Quest materials with the Proquest database Genealogy and Local History Online.

Medford Reference has all the Oregon Federal Census microfilm reels (though not 1890 which was lost in a fire, except for the Census of Pensioners), plus the 1850 Oregon Territory Census. We also have the Soundex reels for Oregon, for 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920. We do not, however, lend our microfilm through Interlibrary Loan. The University of Oregon has all Oregon Federal Census microfilm, and they do lend microforms, though I have not requested any census from them. When I need to borrow census microfilm for a patron, I use the National Archives Census Microfilm Rental Program, since most libraries will not lend census materials. You can consult with the SOLIC librarians to see if you have enough information for us to do a preliminary census search, or to identify an Enumeration District.

If any library is interested in ordering their own Roll 83, on Enumeration Districts, the cost is $34 per roll, and it can be ordered from the National Archives 1930census.archives.gov. Happy hunting! --Julie Drengson

Postscript:
The National Archives has recently added How to Research the 1930 Census Microfilm to their Web site 1930census.archives.gov/beginSearch.asp.

A wonderful feature of this site is a searchable index of the microfilm rolls, by Soundex (for the states that have it) and geographic area. I would suggest searching this site to find Enumeration Districts, rather than using the microfilm rolls. It is much quicker and so much easier! Before starting, read the introduction and instructions so that you understand what the results will be like. Warning: This is not a name search; it is only for figuring out which microfilm roll is needed.

Choose a state from the list on the left side of the screen and click “Go.” The next screen will allow you to search by geographic area or by Enumeration District. For geographic searching, there is an option for County or for City. When searching by County, you will find out how many rolls there are for the County, and how they are numbered. Delve further and you can even find the exact ED, and what area(s) may be included in it.

Calendar

May

National Book Foundation’s National Book Month

3
SOLF Meeting
Southwestern Oregon
Community College
Coos Bay, Oregon

6-7
28th Annual National Library Legislative Day

27
Memorial Day
JCLS and SOLIC closed

June

8-13
Special Libraries Association
2002 Conference
Los Angeles, California

13-19
American Library Association
2002 Annual Conference
Atlanta, Georgia

Internet Training Tool: Bare Bones 101

Have you taught yourself to search the Internet, yet feel like there are gaps in your basic knowledge? Do patrons and staff members in your library want basic Internet training? Are you busy and lack the time to formally train yourself or others? Then try Bare Bones 101, a basic online tutorial for searching the Web created by Ellen Chamberlain, Head Librarian at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort campus. Dale Vidmar, Library Instruction Coordinator/Education and Communication Librarian at Southern Oregon University, included this site in his presentation at this year’s Online Northwest Conference in Eugene.

The short lessons in Bare Bones 101 will help users learn basic concepts and answer questions such as, “How are search engines, metasearch engines, and subject directories different?” “When should I use each one?” “What is a portal?” “What is a vortal?” “What is the invisible Web and how do I access it?” “Which Internet search techniques work with most search engines?” Bare Bones 101 also provides a quick review of features (in cheat sheet form) of sites such as Alta Vista, Fast Search, Google, Ixquick, and Yahoo.

Each lesson is short enough to complete in only ten to fifteen minutes - - just the ticket for a busy library staffer! If this tutorial inspires you and your patrons, try Lesson 17, “Beyond ‘Bare Bones,’” for links to further Internet education. Happy searching!

--Betsy Brubaker

Tools and Tips for Web Searching

Googlewhacking.
It’s a new sport. How do you play? Enter two search terms in Google with the goal of returning just one “hit.” Try it, but be careful! It’s an addictive sport. I learned about Googlewhacking, along with other useful Web searching tips, in a workshop at Online Northwest 2002 given by Dale Vidmar called Power Tools: New Drills for More Thrills.

Vidmar, the Instruction Coordinator Librarian at Southern Oregon University Library, reviewed Internet searching techniques and highlighted special search engine features. Vidmar spoke about the advantages of Google, but also pointed out the strengths of some newer Internet search engines. He emphasized that if we only use one tool in our Web searching, we are not being thorough searchers. Google does what they do so well that we may never look elsewhere, but Vidmar reminds us that, “Savvy Web searching still takes persistence, creativity, and lots of work.” Good searchers seek out other angles, other points of view, and multiple sources of information. Here are a few highlights of Vidmar’s Online Northwest workshop.

Google: Use Google to search a specific Web site. The search “solic site:www.jcls.org” for example, will retrieve all occurrences of the word “solic” on the Jackson County Library Services Web site. Remember this when you are searching a large site that has no internal search engine.

Use Advanced Search to narrow your search by file format or to eliminate certain formats from your search results. You may want to search only Word documents, for example. More likely, you may want to eliminate pdf files from your searches when you just want Web sites, not documents.

Teoma: Teoma is one search engine that uses clustering - - or arranging results by category. Try a search for “Oregon,” and you will get thousands of results, but notice that you have some useful folders at the top of your results page, such as “Oregon Trail” or “County Oregon.”

Be skeptical of the word “expert,” but don’t overlook the “Expert’s Links” on the right-hand side of the page. These links are content-rich directories of resources compiled by individuals.

Wisenut: The best feature here is the automatically-generated WiseGuide that appears just under the search box in your search results. The WiseGuide offer folders of categories and related search terms. A search for “Capital Punishment,” for example, will refer you to sites for “Death Penalty.”

Vivisimo: This metasearcher gives you three options for viewing your search results. You can open a page in the full window, in a new window, or preview the link right on the search results page without losing your place.

Search engines are tools. Good searchers know what kinds of tools are available and how they work in order to select the best tool for the job at hand. By the way, I spent some time Googlewhacking this morning. And I did it: I retrieved just one result with “Cranium Ornitorrinco.” I may have cheated by using the Spanish word for “platypus.” On the other hand, I may have just invented a new subcategory: Bilingual Googlewhacking.

Links

Search Engine Watch
Keep current with news, tips, and reviews of search engines. searchenginewatch.com.

Contents of Dale Vidmar’s presentation at Online Northwest 2002. www.sou.edu/library/dale/newdrills.

SOU Library’s Internet Searching Tools. Lists all search engines talked about in this article, and many more. www.sou.edu/library/searchtools/.

More About Googlewhacking
searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0129-googlewhack.html.

-Anne Gruel

Google Offers Answers for a Fee
answers.google.com/answers/main

Sometime toward the end of April, Google launched the Beta version of Google Answers. What is it? It’s a rather simple, yet astonishing, idea for a digital reference service. Users can send questions to Google Answers, pay a 50-cent posting fee and set the price they will pay for the answer (between $4 and $50). Who answers the questions? Experts. What kind of experts?

Well, you have to apply to be a Google researcher by writing an essay telling why you want the job. Next you have to answer several test questions. If you are chosen to be a Google researcher, you get paid 75 percent of the question price.

What kinds of questions are being posted? You will have to take a look, but they seem representative of the kinds of reference questions librarians receive every day, from “What are the different kinds of mortgages out there?” to a request for a list of the hottest selling e-products. When I checked the site on April 27, there were 418 answered questions posted. Most of the answers I read seemed well-researched, clearly written, and on target.

Will enough people actually pay for answers? This remains to be seen, and raises some interesting questions for libraries and librarians. Tara Calishain, from researchbuzz. com, delves into some of the issues in her article “New Google Answers Service Raises a Few Questions of Its Own.” www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb020422-3.htm.

Even if you are not a paid researcher, you can write in with comments and advice on the questions after the researcher’s answer is posted. This feature makes Google Answers an interactive, information-seeking community to watch, or even take part in.

--Anne Gruel

Spring Into A Good Book

Nancy Pearl, Director of the Washington Center for the Book
OLA/WLA Conference 2002, Portland, Oregon

One of the most popular sessions at the OLA/WLA Conference in April was by Nancy Pearl, well-known book reviewer for Library Journal and author of Now Read This. For over an hour she shared plots, characters, even first lines from her current bag of favorite books. Our pencils were racing but the following summaries (from sketchy notes) do not do justice to her enthusiastic reviews. Just have faith and start your summer reading!

1. The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. Ann Packer. 2002
A young woman is falling out of love just when her fiancé has a horrible accident. Fictional work about a complex dilemma that feels real.

2. Three Junes. Julia Glass. 2002
A first novel with well-developed characters about three summers in the lives of a Scottish family.

3. The Reconstructionist. Josephine Hart. 2001
Gripping story about a psychiatrist who has repressed memory of a horrible childhood trauma. Hart also wrote Damage, but this novel is very different.

4. Eyre Affair. Jasper Fforde. 2002
A first novel described as “enchantingly great”. In a parallel universe someone is stealing characters from British literature. When Jane Eyre is kidnapped, our detective, Thursday Next, must take action.

5. Ghost Soldiers: the Forgotten Epic Story of World War II’s Most Dramatic Mission. Hampton Sides. 2001
Nonfiction. You’ll like this if you liked Black Hawk Down.

6. Captain Saturday. Robert Inman. 2002
Just a good story about a contented weatherman whose life becomes unraveled. Has a warmth similar to work by Michael Malone.

7. A Primate’s Memoir. Robert Sapolsky. 2001
Nonfiction “coming of age” story about Savannah Baboons. They develop into characters you come to love.

8. On the Night Plain. J. Robert Lennon. 2001
A brooding tragedy set on a ranch in Montana just after World War II (don’t read this on a cloudy day.) Lennon also wrote The Funnies, a novel that is very different from Night Plain. If you haven’t read The Funnies, “rush out and read it”. Very funny.