Internet Competency

The website that I found that I am really interested in is YABC: Young Adult (and Kids) Book Central. This is the website that goes along with the blog I choose. Most of the website is used for book reviews, although there is also author interviews, free giveaways, news, and forums. Specifically, "It is a website for people who love books."

One of the things I love about this website is that when they review books, they start the article with things like "Must Read" or "Addictive". Many students will not finish a review, but with that at the beginning, they may actually take the advice.

I did not have to use a search engine in order to find this website. I just went to the blog, http://yabookscentral.blogspot.com/, and they had the link there.

The link to YABC is http://www.yabookscentral.com/. Enjoy!

Research Visual/ Multimedia Competency

Understand a student's reading level, whether it be where they are supposed to be or where they really are, is a very important thing for a school librarian to know. You need to know so that when you are ready to suggest books it is at a readable level for them and not at frustration level. The above graph is Edward Fry's model for estimating reading levels. It looks pretty straight forward, but you will need the instructions to use it.

Fry, Edward (1977).Elementary Reading Instruction. McGraw-Hill. Retrieved on July 16, 2009 from Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators: http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/fry/fry2.html

Image Competency

I found this image using Google Images. I searched "school libraries" since that is my field of study.

I choose this image because it shows me how much a school library needs to be connected with the rest of the school. So many times you find a school librarian that sits in their "hole" only focused on what is going on within those walls. This image shows that school librarians CANNOT do that be then they are missing pieces of the complete puzzle.

Lonsdale, Michelle (2008). "27 October, International School Library Day".Retrieved July 16, 2009 from Google Images: blogs.educationau.edu.au/.../2008/10/asla.jpg.

Competency 6: Specific Facet First Search

I decided to use the Dialog database in order to conduct my Specific Facet First Search. The instructions alone made it seem like it would get my a smaller set of results to start off with this database. I used the Eric database through Dialog. My search was "Young Adult Literature". This yielded 1 hit.

Just to give me a better feel for the program I also searched "Children's Literature" (0 hits) and "Literature" (84,823 hits).

Next in Dialog, I changed databases by using LibLit. I wanted to use the same searches. What I noticed is that you need to have it typed in as "Young Adults' Literature" (2320 hits) instead of "Young Adult Literature" (0 hits). Below is the look of the searches.

Competency #6- Successive Fractions Search

For the Successive Fractions Search, I used ASC. In order to start, I used the broad term "Young Adult Literature". This search got 4, 586 hits. Most of these hits were specific novels instead of Young Adult Literature in general.

My next search added on to the "Young Adult Literature" and I tried to narrow the search by putting "Author Interviews". This only gave me 8 hits and I knew that I had narrowed it too much because some of the hits I had originally seen were not there. So I went back and changed it to "Interviews". This gave me 53 hits.

I did actually try to add one more facet to the search using "Award Winners". This came up with 14,000 hits. This actually blew up my search instead of narrowing it down.

ASC is a very easy database to work with and it gave me a lot of great information. I could also change dates of articles. I believe this is really useful I might have been looking in the 1980s, and I don't want to wade through all of the other articles.

Competency #6- Citation Pearl Growing Search

For the Citation Pearl Growing Search, I used WorldCat. Just looking at the search site, I realized that this is a very useful website. I have been seeing a lot in the news about budget cuts being handed down at a national level to a state level. I knew that this was going to be effecting libraries so I decided that would be my search. For the first search I searched Budgets AND Library AND Public. For that search I had 1,052 hits.

I realized that I might need to take off the focus on a specific library. So I took off the Public and only searched Budgets AND Library. With this search I had 2,046 hits.

Using WebCat was very simple and straight forward. It is a database that I can see students in public schools using with little or no problems.