Reference USA

For a number of years the Worcester Public Library has subscribed to the residential and business databases published by Reference USA. These databases are so heavily used that we decided to provide remote access for our patrons. If your patrons would like to use these two databases from home, and they reside in Massachusetts, they can come to the Worcester Public Library and get a free library card from us.

The folks at Ref USA have compiled information on 14 million United States businesses. As a result, Ref USA is one the most comprehensive business databases being published. However, one of the drawbacks to all business databases, and this includes Ref USA, is that small private businesses generally fall through the cracks. A typical Ref USA business record includes address information, corporate information (including headquarters and all branch locations), annual sales, and credit rating score. You will be told if the company is private or public. If the company is public you also have access to SEC filings, stock exchange information, and annual reports.

Another great advantage to using Ref USA is that the database provides information on home based businesses. While the business database is certainly used to find information on a single company this is not primarily how it is used. Many of our Worcester patrons use the business database to compile lists of like companies within a geographic area for job searching or to market their own product or service. Many entrepreneurs use the database to show venture capital firms who their competition is or isn't!

The residential database holds information on 102 million United States residents. New listings are picked up by Ref USA eight to twelve weeks after they are listed in the telephone white pages. Also, Ref USA consults the national change of address database every month. So, if someone moves after they are listed in the telephone white pages, Ref USA will publish this information within a month. On the minus side, people who have unlisted phone numbers will not show up in the database at all. The residential database can also be consulted for United States census data to determine median household income, median home value, and percentage of owner occupied housing. There are many free online telephone directories out there but Ref USA is clearly the winner.

Need Help? Dial 211

Mass 211 is the telephone number to connect people to information on health and human services. The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) and the Council of Massachusetts United Ways (COMUW) made this Information and Referral Line the Commonwealth"s primary call center in times of emergency.
The state wide Resource Locator has been developed with cooperation between the Executive Office of Health & Human Services , many United Ways, CAC's and community agencies. It replaces the First Call IR service by individual United Ways. Translation is available when one calls.

More details are available at http://www.mass211.org or www.mass211help.org

Marketing/Media packets can be downloaded from this site to advertise the service.

anna k

catching up with popular culture

Popular culture is more than teen lit. If you are like me, and want to keep up with or reach for the cutting edge, there are a few sites, catalogs and magazines that cater to your needs.

Daily Candy: http://www.dailycandy.com/

Daily Candy sends me two emails everyday. One is for "Everywhere," and the other is specific to the Boston area. To use the vernacular, they have the coolest stuff! They will give you the lowdown on up and coming fashion designers, local eateries and the best gifts. Yes, I consume twice the Daily Candy.

• Wired Magazine: http://www.wired.com/

Wired Magazine has been following the technological revolution since March of 1993. In a confusing world, it consistently breaks down the nonsense into understandable chunks. Wired is always on top or ahead of what's happening with computers, science & technology, and the Internet.

My favorite sections are "Jargon Watch" and "Expired-Tired-Wired"...and of course, it's excellent cover-to-cover.

• McPhee's for Christmas: http://www.mcphee.com/

Ever need an inflatable fruitcake? Deluxe finger monsters? The world's largest champagne glass? These gifts are edgy and frankly, out there. Perfect for 30 somethings. They get this!

All for now,
Jillian M. Parsons

Historic American Cookbook Project

http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/project.html

The Feeding America project has created an online collection of some of the most important and influential American cookbooks from the late 18th to early 20th century. The digital archive includes page images of 76 cookbooks from the MSU Library's collection as well as searchable full-text transcriptions. This site also features a glossary of cookery terms and multidimensional images of antique cooking implements from the collections of the MSU Museum.

The Feeding America online collection hopes to highlight an important part of America's cultural heritage for teachers, students, researchers investigating American social history, professional chefs, and lifelong learners of all ages.To learn more Information about the project please select one of the following:

Introductory Essay -
An essay by Jan Longone that discusses Feeding America and the history of cookbooks in America.
Video Tour
- A video highlighting some of the key items in the Feeding America project. (Requires Real Player http://www.real.com/player/)
Frequently Asked Questions
- A list of common questions about the project, and their answers.
Press Coverage -
A selection of articles and reviews written about Feeding America and its recipes as well as links to sites on which Feeding America was a feature.
Digitization Process
- A detailed description of our process for digitizing the cookbooks.
Editorial Intervention
- A description of editorial interventions which were made during the creation of this digital collection.
Encoding Guidelines - These are the XHTML guidelines for encoding the cookbooks. Includes the DTD
Our Staff -
The members of our staff who made Feeding America possible.
MSU Cookery Collection -
A brief overview of the collection which consists of about 7,000 cookbooks

Organize Yourself!

If you want to get organized in your working life or home life, there are a number of Internet sites to get you started. I have two favorites you might enjoy:

The Ta-da! List: http://www.tadalist.com/

It's not a to-do list, it's a Ta-da! list. You can enter your list items and check them off as you complete them. There is a record of what you have accomplished which you can also delete if you want. You can have as many lists as you wish.

The Prioritizer: http://cgi.money.cnn.com/tools/prioritize/prioritize_101.jsp

The Prioritizer can provide hours of fun. It was created by CNN's online personal finance site to help you organize your financial decisions. However, you can use it for anything.

You enter fifteen goals, and then go through a number of screens that ask you to choose one goal over another. The screens show the choices randomly. It is like going to the eye doctor when he says "A or B?" over and over. Of course this is more fun. The result is a list of all of your goals ranked by your choices. This list is strikingly accurate. So try it!!

Culture Shock

Are you aware that it is respectful in certain cultures to remove your shoes when entering a home or place of worship? Or if invited to a Costa Rican home it is appropriate to bring flowers but not lilies since they are a symbol of death? In Indonesia, it’s better to point with your fist than your finger. Culture Crossing is an entertaining website that provides these and other valuable pointers on other cultures.

It is a good place to start if you are traveling abroad or meeting people from other cultures and would like to know a bit about their values, protocol and communication styles. It touches on gesture, taboo, greeting, facts, dress code and other such details so you are better prepared. Some country listings have a short video clip on etiquette.

Although Culture Crossing is a crash-course in cross-cultural etiquette, the information seems to be user generated, so take it with a grain of salt and a pinch of common sense.

Graphic Novels

With the new responsibility of selecting materials for the Graphic Novels collection I am doing what a librarian does first – gathering information. I have found some websites, http://webserver.mcl.org/subj/grafnov.html and http://bookshelf.diamondcomics.com/public/ for example, and borrowed a book from the CMRLS Professional Collection. Also as a typical librarian, I read a few of the graphic novels already in the collection. All of these sources have provided useful information, although they tend to be geared toward YA collections, while I am buying for the adult collection. Does anyone have another source of information, or a favorite artist or series?

VEGAN COOKING

With Thanksgiving around corner many people are looking for recipes. For those of us who don't want to eat the animals, there are lots of yummy vegan recipes out there. I am going to share a few websites and titles of cookbooks that i have encountered to get you started.

www.theppk.com Is the Post Punk Kitchen which is a cooking show's website with Isa Moskowitz and Terry Romero. I have 3 of their cookbooks which are terrific. I have tried many recipes and they have been enjoyed by vegans, vegetarians and meat eaters. There are suggestions for altering non-vegan recipes to be vegan with substitutions as well as information on vegan cooking and cooking in general.

Veganomicon
Vegan with a Vengeance
Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (i love the title!)

www.vegcooking.com

www.veganmania.com

www.fatfreevegan.com

www.veganfeastkitchen.blogspot.com which is a site for Bryanna Clark Grogan who is the author of many cookbooks.

www.vegweb.com has reviews and comments on the recipes. It is helpful to read a few of them to see what a few people think of it as well as ideas on how to alter the recipe.

www.vitalita.com is a website that has two downloadable cookbooks on it that are also mostly gluten free.

govegan.net is a site from a canadian cookbook author Sarah Kramer. I have one of her books and it has lots of information on vegan cooking and other things as well (ex: many uses of baking soda.)
The Garden of Vegan.

www.peta.org has recipes as well as information on the vegan lifestyle. they have put out a few cookbooks, two of which get lots of use at my house.

The Compassionate Cook, or, Please don't eat the animals.
Cooking with PETA (terrific brownie recipe- they will never know it has tofu-tried and loved by many staff at Worcester Public Library and a delicious pumpkin pie that i make for my family every thanksgiving - never know it has tofu! secret is to really blend it well so no lumps.)

Another book that gets too much use at my house is
The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau
Lots of information on baking and substitutions. Full of information as well as good recipes.

I hope you all enjoy your holiday baking and cooking.

Katherine R.

The Longest Month

The trouble with doing book displays is the better your display is the faster the books go out and the sooner you are looking for replacements. Some display subjects have enough material that refills aren't a problem; but others force me to improvise wildly. For example I usually fill in the period between when the first frost forces me to take down the gardening display and when I can put up the holiday books with a batch of autumn themed books. I use cookbooks for soups, stews, pies and other cold weather foods add in some craft books such as gourd crafts, wheat weaving, and scarecrows. In October I can use Halloween related books: pumpkin carving, costume making, theatrical makeup, horror movies, ghosts, werewolves and vampires. November is a very long month when it comes to keeping the display filled. Fortunately there are a few new books on the Mayflower and the Pilgrims; but when they are gone I have to start sneaking in the Puritans and colonial history in general. After the turkey, potato, and pumpkin cookbooks go out, I have to add poultry and New England cookbooks. Every now and then I have a flash of inspiration; one year the day before Thanksgiving I put out books on napkin folding. Usually I'm just searching desperately for ideas. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Google is Taking Spoken Questions via iPhone

The New York Times reported that "Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone."

Users of the free application can ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?"

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/technology/internet/14voice.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Novelist Plus is now Offered by WPL

The Worcester Public Library now offers remote access to Novelist Plus – a complete readers’ advisory solution. Novelist Plus is available to anyone with a valid Worcester Public Library card.

Special features:
• Information on more than 200,000 titles, including over 50,000 nonfiction
• Approximately 20,000 new titles added yearly
• Author Read-alikes, Book Discussion Guides and BookTalks
• Hundreds of reading lists covering all genres and reading levels and over 300 award lists
• Continued coverage of series information with thousands of adult and juvenile, fiction and nonfiction series, all in reading order
• Librarians and patrons can create and annotate their own lists using “My Folders and Alerts”

To access:
Go to http://www.worcpublib.org/
Click on Online Databases
Then select Reading Suggestions
Or
Access from this blog
Click on Novelist Plus under WPL Remote Databases in the right column of this blog

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Ping at pschen@cwmars.org

Growing Up in Worcester and Around the World

This coming Sunday, November 16th, local author and movie reviewer for the Telegram and Gazette, Jeffrey E. Long, will present a talk entitled "Growing Up in Worcester and Around the World: Reading Memoirs for Pleasure, Bibliotherapy and Cultural Insight" at 2:00 p.m. in the Saxe Room at the main branch of the Worcester Public Library, 3 Salem Square. Jeff is the author of "Remembered Childhoods: A Guide to Autobiography and Memoirs of Childhood and Youth" which was published by Scarecrow Press in 2007. He has also been an active participant in the Worcester County Writers Project that I've discussed in previous postings.

This entertaining and informative event should be of interest to all readers, from the mildly curious to those who, like myself, are addicted to the coming-of -age memoir, particularly in this post-James Frey world.

The program is free and open to all. Hope to see you there.

Joy

ESL, GED and Citizenship Info

Information on GED, ESL and the Citizenship process is much sought after at the Worcester Public Library. We have updated these pages on our website and hope that your patrons will find them helpful too.

The classes and agencies listed on our website are located in the Worcester area. Most often, our patrons have found themselves wait-listed since the class of their choice is full. We hope that with this resource, patrons can now make use of alternate locations that provide the same service.

We’ve also added links to a list of ESL/GED and Pimsleur language materials available at the Worcester Public Library. In addition, you can connect to learning English websites, practice tests from LearningExpress and the new Naturalization test from this blog.

For Bibliophiles Only...

While looking for library-inspired furniture for a gift, I stumbled across this website, http://kimbooktu.com/. Kim lives in The Netherlands and is obsessed with collecting books AND book-related gadgets, such as invisible and creative shelving. Not finding a satisfactory site, she started this one to bring together all things books, explaining "there is a lot to find on the web about literature et cetera. But no website that contains articles and products that have to do with reading. Reading gadgets, if you will. Until now. I have been longing for a site with stuff that I could lust for. And occasionally buy. This is why I decided to start a blog with reading gadgets myself. Very rapidly I found out that a lot of people were also waiting for a site like this."

The site is still undergoing organization, but there are lists of blogs for every reading interest as well as links to many library-related products. One of my favorites is a YouTube film for a library chair that follows you around the building, stopping to rest wherever you need it. Enjoy browsing!

U.S. Cities Profiles

http://www.city-data.com/
According to the about us page of this site "We've collected and analyzed data from numerous sources to create as complete and interesting profiles of all U.S. cities as we could. We have over 63,000 city photos not found anywhere else, graphs of latest real estate prices and sales trends, recent home sales, home value estimator, hundreds of thousands of maps, satellite photos, stats about residents (race, income, ancestries, education, employment...), geographical data, state profiles, crime data, registered sex offenders, cost of living, housing, businesses, local news links based on our exclusive technology, birthplaces of famous people, political contributions, city government finances and employment, weather, hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, airports, radio and TV stations, zip codes, area codes, air pollution, latest unemployment data, time zones, water systems and their health and monitoring violations, comparisons to averages, professionally written city guides, a forum and a social network with 420,000 registered members and 5,300,000 posts, 5,000+ user-submitted facts, 13,000+ exclusive local business profiles with photos, and more demographics. If you ever need to research any city for any reason, from considering a move there to just checking where somebody you know is staying, this is the site for you."

U.S. Government Documents

People often think of U.S. Government Documents as tomes of textual material. Did you know that they really are available in a variety of formats? The Worcester Public Library's U.S. Document collection, in addition to over 90,000 paper items,and over 200,000 microfiche items, currently contains over 900 CD-ROM items, 83 DVD-ROM items, and 20 VHS tapes. There are also KITS which contain information on various topics which can be used as teaching aids. All of these documents are available for loan. They can be searched for on the Worcester Public Library's Online Catalog.

Learning Languages Online

The Worcester Public Library staff, along with the staff of the Literacy Volunteers of Greater Worcester, are considering two online world language programs to offer to patrons interested in learning or improving a second language whether it be a foreign language or English.

I spent a little time trying both Mango and Tell Me More through our trial subcriptions and my thoughts are below.

Regarding Mango:
· The ESL programs are designed for learners with a specific native language – there is no general ESL.
· The grammatical explanations appear to be inserted irregularly and are quite technical.
· Both the German and Spanish language programs (the two world languages I tried as I have some knowledge of both) introduced the informal “you” in the second lesson, in the context of first meetings. They did identify this as Informal/Friendly Conversation, but my understanding is that there is no such thing as an informal conversation in German and Spanish speaking countries when you are merely acquainted unless you are talking to a child or an animal. This seems to be a true flaw. It may be interesting to note that in the Spanish-to -English lesson, formal address was maintained in the Friendly Conversation.
· The slides seemed slow to load.
· The optional repetition and color-coded breakdown of phrases is useful.

Regarding Tell Me More:
· Much more content, and greater depth unless Mango only allowed access to partial
content.
· More interactive with greater variety of learning activities.
· Multiple language choices for the portal.
· General ESL.

If I was interested in learning or practicing another language, I would choose Tell Me More. Who is our audience? What role do we want this program to fill?

Are you familiar with Tell Me More or Mango? If you are interested, go to their websites and learn a little more about these products: www.tellmemore.com and www.mangolanguages.com. Please feel free to share your thoughts about these products. We would be especially interested to hear from any libraries that have offered this service to their patrons.

Bookletters

At the Worcester Public Library we've started using Bookletters as a tool for Readers Advisory services as well as marketing purposes. Posted on the library homepage, http://www.worcpublib.org, you'll find a widget with thumbnail covers of new titles that patrons can click on to link directly to our catalog, where they can find out more information on that title and place requests. You'll also find links for our YA librarian's top picks for teens, Most Requested Titles and signups for email newsletters.

From the Bookletters website:

More than an e-newsletter service or Web content enhancement source, BookLetters is your marketing partner. BookLetters gives you a comprehensive set of tools and thousands of pages of content on books, authors and films so that every branch or department can promote its collection and programs on the Web or through subscription e-newsletters...with BookLetters, you can add your message to Web pages embellished with BookLetters content and customize the pages with your own information. The core of the BookLetters content is our 4 million book database that generates book detail pages that include brief annotations and jacket covers. This core content is enhanced with a continual flow of exclusive BookPage reviews, author biographies, topical editorial clips, seasonal book promotions, book discussion guides, DVD streaming video previews, audiobook narration clips, sound clips, look inside feature and even podcasts.

Creating targeted custom lists is easy - just enter up to 20 ISBNs for each list, view, and publish. Patrons (and staff) can sign up to receive monthly newsletters on new audiobooks, books on the air or children's picture books among others. Annotations and images of book covers are provided by Bookletters editors and reviewers. Bookletters also lets you track how many subscribers you have for each booklist. If any of you have tried the Bookletters product, we'd be interested in hearing about what you've created, and your patrons response. Do you use the provided annotations, or do you prefer your own reviews? Have you used Bookletters to produce a library newsletter?

Kia Ora!

"Now you know how to greet people in Maori!"

Every time you go to Flickr.com, you learn a way to greet people in a different language. This is only one of the ways the site is engaging. Flickr is a web presence that uses the Creative Commons method of copyrighting for their "P2P" (peer to peer) sharing of photographs and other images.

Copyright law has been nebulous and ever-changing when it comes to the Internet, and particularly when it comes to digital images. For example, if you are browsing Google Images, and find a picture you like, you can click on the image and go to the website where the image was posted. Unfortunately, an overwhelming number of websites do not include copyright information for their pictures. So what's a girl to do?

On sites like Flickr, that use Creative Commons, the copyright is transparent.

These are the stipulations one of the artists placed for one of the photos in my Favorites folder:

"You are free:

• to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
  Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. "

So, the copyright rules are crystal clear.

Why don't you try it out yourself? You can checkout all of the photos and images you can use for your own purposes! Go to:
http://www.flickr.com/

I would love to introduce you guys to the site. You are welcome to send me a note with your name and e-mail, and I can give you permission to look at all of the favorite photos I have amassed over the years! You can contact me at mllejmparsons@gmail.com




I hope you have fun. Happy Picture Surfing!

Peace,
Jillian

Voting Reference: learn about the upcoming election

A few nonpartisan sources to learn about the candidates and ballot questions:

• Congress.org: Presidential Candidate Guide
  
• New York Times Election Guide
  
• Washington Post Elections
  
• FactCheck: University of Pennsylvania site which analyzes claims made by candidates
  
• Project Vote Smart
• Massachusetts Information for Voters (PDF)