MARVELous Maine Invitational - Week 3

Wow! 123 participants in the MARVELous Maine Invitational! That is a lot of reference work happening among our Maine librarians! Way to go Maine!

This week, the feature to research is Newspapers and Maine Newsstand. Both of these resources are supplied by Proquest, a database supplier. From national favorites to Maine favorites, this is sure to be useful to our patrons.

While our focus is on Maine Newsstand, I enjoyed learning about the Maine Memory Network and Windows on Maine as I watched the opening video. I look forward to exploring those resources at a later time.

I did a basic search for 'Donn Fendler'. Many of the results were more like calendar events than articles about Donn. I limited the search to the past two years. When I tried to create an alert to receive notification of more events posted, I found that once again, I had to set up an account with a new username and password. Being someone who likes to keep things simple, I find it frustrating to have to set up new accounts within MARVEL. I could see where it might be very frustrating to patrons, especially if they are not of the Generation X or Y vintage. It feels like I am accumulating more usernames and passwords for MARVEL than all of my other accounts combined!

I did use the translation tool to view a short article in French. That was fun trying to recall my two years of high school French! Yet a useful tool for our bilingual patrons.

I also searched for Ryan Cook, as he filmed a documentary about obtaining the rights to Donn Fendler's life story. I found a couple of nice articles in the Kennebec Journal.

I also used the obituary feature, which lead me to the obituary of a friend who lived in the southern part of the state, so her obit was not in local papers here. It was nice to be able to read about her in that way.

I have read several blogs from others participating in this invitational. I noticed that there are eight people with more than one participant entry. Perhaps they are representing their library and their personal interest. I did comment on one blog. This has been my first attempt at creating a personal blog even though I have read other blogs and subscribe to a couple favorites.

I use MARVEL as a resource for patrons as much as possible. The most common applications I have used are directing patrons to back issues of Consumer Reports, using Novelist Plus to find good books and read-a-likes, and showing them how to access Learning Express to reinforce math skills.

Last week I had a patron doing research on a very specific health condition. I directed her to the Health subject where she found what she needed in Nursing and Allied Health Collection. She was going to search a couple of the other health data bases on her own at home.

Onward to Week #4 . . . .