An Authors Perspective

I forgot also this time to mention that BookBrowse had a link to the author's website which I found useful.

An Author's perspective

One of my favourite authors is Alexander McCall Smith. I tried all the sites listed on the module page and only two featured this author. One was BookBrowse and the other was Google authors@google which led to talks@google. BookBrowse only had a written interview though which i didn't bother to trail through as i have done enough reading today! The google one was a You Tube interview and there were many of them. The one I chose to listen and watch was about the author's life in Botswana and Scotland and how he uses the lives of the people in these countries to form the basis of the characters of his books. The video was extremely interesting and it was great to obtain first hand background knowledge concerning the writing of Smith's books. I loved it.
I think this site would be really useful for patrons to know about as I have 'often' tried to encourage them to read the "Ladies Detective' stories and haven't had a great response. Some patrons think they are too 'simple' and wouldn't be very enjoyable. I believe visiting sites such as authors@google would persuade them otherwise!

Module 3 Topic 2

I forgot to mention that I have only the original Proquest alert on 'reindeers' which I received in the first instance. I have had no more alerts from Proquest but have had a Google alert everyday. Maybe the subject' reindeers' does not elicit much information or news!

Module 3 Topic 2

Hooray I got another google alert today. This is fun. My topic is about christmas traditions and today's alert was all about how to determine whether your live christmas tree is fresh or not! Great tips for those people who buy their trees off the roadside. I myself like to go to a christmas tree farm and choose and cut it down myself. Or rather the owner cuts it down. I have to be careful to choose the right size though. Like the man who wrote the article in my 'alert' I chose a tree that turned out to be too big for my lounge. It went right up to the ceiling and was on a 'lean-to' for the whole christmas period!!

Specialist Search Engines

Module 4 Topic 2.Back again. I have tried out the blinx site and the You Tube one. I chose the topic 'climate change'. While I liked the thumb nail pictures on the blinx site where there were numerous ones to choose from I preferred the You Tube ones on the same subject. I found You Tube much more comprehensive and easier to use. I also liked the fact that the duration of the videos were there upfront on the preview picture. I didn't have to search for it.
It took me awhile to realise that Life magazine is actually part of Time! I think searching magazines this way is great. I had a patron ask me the other day about books on child rearing. I found an article just now in one of the Life magazines about the 'middle age child 6-12.' This would have been useful to show that patron.
I have now searched the topic 'family films' (meaning films suitable for families) in all issues of Life and the results were 'films' about families. I will have to refine my search. I entered 'films suitable for families' and I found an issue of Life dated 1949. Fantastic. I think I'll use this site all the time(no pun intended!) if I notice, while I am shelving, an article in a magazine that I want to read. I won't have to take out the whole magazine! Great.

Google web searches

Phew. I am totally exhausted. How on earth can people assimilate so much information at one time??? Do people really have time to go backwards and forwards between search engines? Hence the advantage of Dogpile and Metacrawler I guess but I didn't find them as detailed and fun to use as the others. I liked the Google wonderline and timeline the best. They were great. Wish i'd known about them before I did my assignments!! I found all options easy to use. The results , I felt, didn't differ too much between search engines. All relevant information was there and differed only in that they were obtained from various sources.

oh everything has disappeared!! What a pain.