Sutherland Shire Libraries Staff News

Ref rap- More science madness!
Seeing the presentation of mad science at Sutherland library in the school holidays has reminded me of the great resources the library has relating to information about science. For aspiring scientists and anyone else who would like more science project ideas, or to conduct further experiments, there are lots of great ideas available on the World Book database. These can be accessed from world book on for kids by clicking on the Science projects icon. There are heaps of projects to choose from covering eight different areas including animals, plants, machines, matter and energy, microscopic life, our planet, your body and science you can use. There are long term experiments, last minute experiments, as well as tips for working safely. You can also access these projects plus more experiments for older students from The World book Online Info Finder.

A good starting point for future scientists and school students requiring information on general science topics is The Science Reference Centre. This database covers a wide range of scientific topics including biology, chemistry, earth & space science, environmental science, health & medicine, history of science, life science, physics, science & society, science as inquiry, scientists, technology and wildlife. It is a full text database including access to science encyclopaedias, reference books, periodicals, newspapers and biographies. It has all the great search features associated with Ebscohost databases, such as smart text searching, saving selected documents to a folder and creating email alerts and RSS feeds. You can search within particular publications, search for images, or if you want to browse, you can search by subject. For example, typing in “science project” allows you to see all content about this topic showing the number of items available in each format. You can also limit your searches to just images, or use filters including date ranges, lexile reading level, publication type, or benchmarks.

Another choice is the Pro Quest Science Journals. This is a more academic database. It also covers a wide range of science topics in a variety of scientific journals, newspapers, trade journals, reference/reports and dissertations. This database allows the user to conduct basic and advanced searches, as well as searching by topic or publication. In a basic search, after typing the initial keyword, sentence or question, you are offered suggested topics to browse, and you have the option to narrow the search by document type.
Searching by topic allows you to enter the topic of interest or browse the subject directory. Alternatively, you can look up topic A-Z and search by people, locations, companies, subjects, dates and publications.
If you search by publication there are indicators of whether they are full text, and the coverage dates, with some titles going back to 1992. You can also create RSS feeds with certain titles.

This has been just a quick overview to remind you of three databases focusing on science, the library has on offer. They are all fairly easy to navigate and are designed to meet the scientific information needs of different customer markets. So if you have a chance, why not have a look so you can show our customers just how much more scientific it can be to use these free databases, rather than just the internet.

We now have a subscription to World Book Online Public Library Edition. It currently requires a membership number to access it via the TAC network, but this should be rectified soon. It is available remotely and so is available to any library member, as a reliable benchmark to judge their Wikipedia research against!

This is a product that has 3 parts;

World Book Online for Kids - especially for young people. The site offers easy-to-read articles and a wealth of engaging multimedia, games, science projects, interactive tools, and activities.

World Book Online Info Finder - designed for school-aged patrons’ homework and research needs. Based on the World Book Encyclopedia, the site features rich collections of multimedia on a variety of topics, science fair projects; a Biography Center; links to world newspapers, correlations to curriculum standards, 21st century research guides, and much more.

World Book Online Reference Center - a reference tool for advanced researchers and information seekers. The site features thousands of e-books, tens of thousands of articles, and hundreds of thousands of primary source documents and features developed especially for public library patrons such as Computer and Web Tutorials, How To... documents, and Government Resources.

Besides providing much information within it’s pages, World Book Online also provides links to quality websites, freely available articles and interactive map links related to the subject of your search. These resources are outside the website and you are informed of such as you leave. It also has a facility to save your research and come back to it.

I strongly advise that all staff become familiar with this new product, as it is replacing the new edition of the print version. (This will be reviewed, so keep on eye on who uses which format, and how often). Training options are available once you have logged in, including video tutorials which lead you through the various resources available.

A brochure will be produced that you can readily hand out, which points out features and customer tutorial options, also posters will be coming. ( Yes, they will be kept to A4!)

Recently there was a demonstration of Britannica Online that branch, kids and some ref staff were able to look in on. It was a great tool and would have been wonderful to get, unfortunately the budget did not allow.

Looking again at World Book Online, it has many of the features that Britannica had, so if something grabbed your fancy that day, look for it and you may find!

Enjoy