At our library I make extensive use of Proquest, Ebsco products, and NetLibrary. When we do class presentations, we instruct and encourage students to use them. NetLibrary is a great resource for our students to have access to current books.
Because I am more familiar with the higher academic resources, I concentrated on searches using the Gale Discovering Collection geared for students from grades 8-12 and did searches in MasterFILE Premier tonight. After hearing Nancy Pelosi on NPR this noon, I did a search on her as well as on other names and topics. I must admit that this was the first time that I logged on the ELM Portal on my personal computer at home using my public library barcode number. My barcode number from my college id. card has been in my memory for years, but I never even thought of using my public library number to access ELM databases from home. Searching different databases gave me a new perspective of the many resource available to us in Minnesota.
I had not tried the Page Composer or RSS Feeds in ELM yet, and was surprised by features that I did not even know were available. Besides doing an account and a new folder, I also saved an article to my Del.icio.us account. The search for images is easy to do in the EBSCO databases. Tonight I spent a lot of time on Facebook as I wanted to have a "head start" on Thing Twenty so that I have something to report by the time I reach that THING. I will return to Thing Eighteen soon to do more exploring.
LATER: I returned to ELM on 09/14, and had time to work more with the search alerts feature, a very useful one.
