Lesson 6 - NetLibrary

1. I changed the default “full text” search to “keyword” search and used “Nebraska” as the search term. (I thought it would be interesting to compare these results later to those in exercise #3.)

Search returned list of 61 ebooks including titles published by the University of Nebraska. The list included familiar authors (e.g., Willa Cather) and titles (e.g., Orphan Trains). Personally the brown and red book icons are BORING…like those huge uninviting sets of dusty old hardcover books in the reference section of an academic library.

Adding the limiter “fiction” reduced the list of titles to 8.

I was slightly frustrated by not being able to quickly scan a brief list of titles (aka, titles only) – I would feel similar frustrations later when I retrieved really l-o-n-g lists…frustrated about not having alphabetical access to the list OR not having more choices than only 4 consecutive pages in the results list OR not having a way to jump say 5 or 10 screens ahead/backward OR to zip quickly to the end or beginning of the results list.

However, I was intrigued by some of the titles in this results list and thought some would be fun to read IFF I really had the time to do so, as in being retired!

I viewed O PIONEERS. I was surprised by unexpected hyphenated words in the middle of lines. I wasn’t sure if these had been originally written that way by the author, or just a default repeat use of the hyphen that was at the end of the line in the original text that was automatically kept when the page was digitized and reformatted.

I did notice the little purple box showing RANK and wondered what it was about. Relevance? Later I would click on the drop arrow and discover that my choices for displaying the list was by rank, title, author, newest first, and oldest first.

Then I viewed BLUE HOTEL by Stephen Crane. OMG. What a story. Hard to believe this was written in 1898. Because I’m Swedish, my sympathies were with “The Swede.” But the story is far more complicated than mere genealogy. Like I said, WHAT A STORY!!! Does anyone write this well anymore? WOW. I think this would be great to use with high school students.

I wanted to save the story but was unable to highlight and select (aka, copy & paste) it into a word document. Printing it only printed a portion of what I could see on the screen.

2. I used the keyword search “Constitution” and retrieved 13 ebooks, including one about the Constitution of Japan. Then I added the keyword “fiction” and that brought up NO matches. A third full text search for “Constitution” brought up 3,110 titles. (Repeat frustration from above re: not being able to skim or jump through a list of titles.)

Number 3 in the list was Our Elusive Constitution by Daniel Hoffman that did sound like it would be interesting to read. I viewed that book, too, and especially liked being able to see the book contents list at left.

I skimmed a few of the first pages of the book. I had to chuckle at the last sentence of the preface on Page x that reads: “I cannot resist suggesting that the People of the United State, and especially the Framers of the Constitution, are particularly responsible for the remaining flaws of this book.” If the author did write his book with this sort of humor, perhaps this would be both an informative and engaging book to read.


3. I selected the Advanced Search option, typed “Nebraska” as Publisher and retrieved 56 ebooks (vs. 61 ebooks in Exercise #1 using a keyword search.) Again, I wish I could have viewed or printed a simple list of titles without summaries or additional information. Some interesting titles and familiar author names here: Moon of Popping Trees, Choteau Creek, WigWam Evenings, Erdrich, Dorris, etc.

For fun I added more qualifiers: Nebraska +Dakota = 12 results; Nebraska +Lakota = 3 results; Nebraska +Sioux=10 results.

I decided to try using the SORT BY feature. I searched: All + Ebooks +English then sorted by NEWEST FIRST. Even though there were 5,511 in the results list, this list gave me a whole different array of titles including People at Work, Pitch and Throw, Grasp and Know: What is a Synonym, [Interestingly, only now as I am trying to find all the little notes I wrote while doing this search, do I notice that these results pages printed with minimal information as compared to the paragraphs printed in my initial searches…is this a function of the number of results?]

BTW, I really like having the covers shown in the results list.

Clicking through pages of titles, many looked pretty interesting –how would I have ever known that Cooking the Russian Way and Cooking the Thai Way are in NetLibrary. Who knows how many other cook books are in NetLibrary? I don’t…and it didn’t occur to me then in the middle of that sequence to use the keyword “cooking” but maybe I will do that the next time I “play” in NetLibrary.

After more exploring with various screens and finding some Spanish titles in the results, I tried to limit my results to titles in Spanish. My eye caught some box at right of the screen. It directed me to use “In Our Collection.”

When I used full text = Spanish and keyword = Spanish, I retrieved 3,112 titles. (Ah, yes, how to browse more than 3K titles….mmmmm). Then I used an advanced search with econtent language = Spanish and retrieved 39 titles. I can deal with a list that size. Then I added the keyword “juvenile” and retrieved a list of 38 titles.

I picked a title to view, then looked through a series of its pages. (I have a very limited knowledge of Spanish.) I was somewhat turned off by the plain vanilla text format but was nicely surprised to see full color illustrations, too.

I decided to play with the dictionary option at left of the screen. At first I chuckled as I wondered just how useful an English dictionary was going to be translating text written in Spanish. Soon I realized that the drop down menu included both an English-to-Spanish dictionary and a Spanish-to-English dictionary.

The first word I tried to have translated was “regresar.” I’d hoped that all I had to do was highlight the word to translate it, but I had to type it in the search box. “Regresar” turned out to be a verb (I was pretty sure of that to start with) without a definition in the dictionary.

Even so, I could click the sound icon and hear the word spoken…over and over and over again until I clicked the pause icon on the popup audio box. I kept inserting various words from the text until I was able to find one that had a definition. Dictionary entries often had lots of information that looked useful to a Spanish student: various definitions, idioms and idiomatic phrases, etc.

I like to think that our Spanish teacher might find that some of these juvenile books in Spanish might be useful in her high school Spanish classes. I’ve already contacted her about showing her NetLibrary on Wednesday.

Once again, as in past weeks, the more I explored this week’s resource, the more cool stuff I found. NetLibrary doesn’t seem to have the same bells and whistles as previous resources, but I am impressed just the same.

I have a number of friends who might find that NetLibrary offers them a wide variety of titles for their reading interests and pleasure.

Admittedly I need to practice my searching skills to find something specific that I need but I certainly didn’t have any trouble finding titles that I might like.