Lesson 7 World Cat

Lesson 7 World Cat

1.  I like the variety of searching methods, especially if you are looking for an unusual title, or one that you know would have many possibilities such as ‘bears’. Using the series or ISBN is useful. Sometimes searching for DVD titles is especially difficult.

2. I found 2535 Libraries world wide with books that had the title ‘Malice’ . There were 262 results with 118 in English. The first book on the list was by Danielle Steel, held by the Alexander Mitchell library. When I tried various limiters I especially liked that adult/juvenile was easy to find at the top and the year was easy as well, you can simply click on a year that is listed with the number of items from that year in parenthesis after it, or put in a range.

3. Being able to click on a subject or author etc. is a great feature for cataloging and also for selection purposes. As I scrolled down the record I also found the record for the same book published by the Australian branch of the company. I did not try any others this time but will try this in the future, as often cataloging books from companies like Scholastic who change the ISBN on books, gets tricky to find from our software.

OAIster  brought up some interesting results. The paper I accessed first was on South Dakota agriculture. The article actually started on the Table of contents page so I missed half of the first paragraph but the navigation made it easy to click back to the first page. I was surprised to see it was written in 1933; before the full force of the dust bowl years. I returned to the results list to find many of the records did not include a publication or copyright date, although a few did include the date in the title or description. Some of the results included items such as letters so this could be a good resource for teachers to include ‘primary sources’ into their lessons.

I would like to look into the possibilities of getting the software so that records could be downloaded into our school software. This would be a great timesaver while still maintaining records with complete subject headings and alternate titles.