Week 1 Facebook

Wow! Libraries are using Facebook for almost everything. The pages that I looked at are using it to notify patrons of upcoming events, announce new books or write book reviews, hours the library is open and area happenings in their communities.

Hello!! I'm Ashley and I am the library director at the Edgemont Public Library, I have been here for 2 years and I love it! I have a wonderful husband Nate and I am a mother to 4 wonderful yet very rambunctious boys Mason is 9, Talen is 6, Gradin is 5 and Jaxtan is 3. My husband Nate and I also own the flower shop here in Edgemont and we have a carpet cleaning business.  Besides all of this I love to fish with my boys, read and arranging flowers is my new hobby on the weekends:)  I am really looking forward to this class in hopes I can reach out to my patrons better. 

Reference Sources

One website that our library can not live without is Bookmooch: www.bookmooch.com
Since we are a library with a very tight budget, this site allows us to mooch books that have been lost or damaged off of others. It is done on a points system.  One receives points every time you donate a book and then you can use the points you earn to purchase books that are needed in our library. Since we are a library we don't have may books to donate but we receive numerous point donations from others, which are very helpful.

Wrap Up

My biggest discovery through the electronic resources challenge was the World Book resource and the Ancestry resource. These are both something that I personally found informative and that I feel will be very useful in our library. When promoting these resources I have a list of electronic resources that are available through the State Library and tell them that assistance is available accessing these resources.

History & Genealogy Resources

When searching for myself in the Ancestry Library I didn't find anything with my married name or my maiden name, nor did I find my marriage license.  But when searching for my grandpa I would all the addresses he lived at from 1993 till when he died.  It also stated that he was in the US Navy and is buried at BH National Cemetery.  I was amazed at the information that was given when searching for South Dakota in the "Photos and Maps".  There were 319,195 births in SD from 1856-1903; 545,737 marriages in SD from 1905-1949; and 322,632 deaths in SD from 1905-1955. Very Interesting!! One can also find photos and maps for military, newspapers and publications, immigration and travel.

In Heritage Quest I searched Fall River, SD and had one result by George W. Kingsbury called "History of the Dakota Territory" that was dated 1915 and has 5 volumes.

Sanborn Maps- I couldn't find Edgemont so I clicked on Hot Springs and found the old hospital building that is now used for elderly housing and a clinic / swing bed place.

WorldCat

It seems lately we have processed a large amount of ILL, so I used WorldCat and looked up our last request "The Warrior Elite: The Forging of Seal Class 228" by Dick Couch.  I found out that there are 681 libraries worldwide that have this book and the top library was Dakota State University in South Dakota! The call number for this book is 359.9, and when looking to see what else this author has to offer I found that he has about 40 other books. After clicking on the subject I was amazed that there was 895 other books on the same subject.

After searching "South Dakota" in OAIster I chose Government building at the Pine Ridge Indian Agency in South Dakota and when clicking on the access link I was given a very neat old picture of the government building that shows a samll collection of building that have horse drawn vehicles parked around it.

ProQuest

When looking through ProQuest I researched a medical condition I have called vascular malformation to find out a little bit more information about it.  After typing in what i was searching for within minutes I had a large amount of information in minutes. From books to magazines, to scholarly journals, trade journals, reports and newspapers. I loved all the pictures that were available to help support the information that was being presented.  I read through a scholarly journal on diagnosis and per-cutaneous management, and found out that my doctor was one of the references used when writing the journal.

After looking at everyone else blogs, I loved the wide variety of searches that were conducted. I learned a lot by reading others and it just goes to show you whats all out there.

When searching "Library" I found over 4000 publications related to libraries. There are also different ways you can view your findings, such as title and summery. This is a very useful database and can be used to research anything.