1 I picked the UXL Encyclopedia of World Mythology from the SHOW ALL list, then used the drop down menu to find the volume with H for Heracles/Hercules. I really liked that the dropdown menu showed both the volume number AND alphabetical range for the volume. I also really liked the page appearance of this resource. Not cluttered, easy to read font and font size on white background. Article was informative and readable. The article was useful because it provided basic but complete information about this hero. I recently had the sudden opportunity to watch the Disney movie Hercules with a group of sixth graders. I hadn’t seen the movie before and didn’t remember anything about this hero. After the movie, I googled a Wikipedia article about the movie that said the Disney version was not close to the traditional myth. The information in this encyclopedia article was a more accurate and complete description of the mythical character known as Heracles/Hercules.
2. I typed the words “foods cholesterol” in the “Basic Search” search box. One article was retrieved: Cholesterol, High” in the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, v. 2, p. 867-870. I found the article very readable and easy to understand, with lots of useful and NEW TO ME information. The voice in the “Read to Me” feature sounded female and real (not computer generated). In fact, “she” sounded a bit like Jane Fonda, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. Another time I will try listening to another article, just to see if that voice also is (or, sounds) female and whether it has as natural a sound as this one. At first I was uncertain how to stop the voice, and even though I thought I had stopped the voice, it restarted seemingly on its own. Eventually I discovered the stop start and pause icons and their mouse-over labels and was able to stop the “read to me” feature. I think this is a wonderful feature for lots of people of any age, reading, vision, and/or language abilities. The sound quality of this voice was much, much better than the audio version of an earlier database we explored.
3. I agree with JeanWKLibrary that Gale is extensive and certainly could be overwhelming. But I found this resource very user friendly, with lots of nice helpful features that aren’t hard to understand, find or use. Once the access issues from school were resolved, I now know that Gale is easily accessed from either school or home. I know there are even more resources on the Gale list that I will like to use—like Kids InfoBits. I “stumbled” into it several weeks ago and really, really liked it then, but will confess I did not review it again for this week. But I KNOW I’m going to tell our Spanish teacher about the “language” features of Gale, and will certainly advise other teachers about GALE and Kids InfoBits.
I am curious about Moon Musing’s tip about using the PMID (Proquest Media Identifier) to limit a search to just one publication. I’m running out of daylight and energy tonight so I will put that on my TO TRY LATER list.
1 comment:
Hi, Bookblogr! What a relief to get your technical issues solved so that you could have a good experience in GVRL! You picked my personal favorite, the mythology title, which I like for the same reasons you cited. It also offers a pronunciation key, which is helpful. We do think that Gale Virtual Reference library greatly expands libraries' reference holdings. To clarify for everyone reading this, GVRL is the only Gale resource provided by the State Library. The other Gale resources, such as Kids Infobits, are provided by SDLN, a member organization. Only SDLN members or remote members have access to those. Thanks for your comments. It's great to keep learning!
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