This was surprising as the library itself appears state of the art and modern, and is always full of locals hunched over in the research and study section.
Maybe I'm not surfing the site properly, I thought. Nope, still nothing except access to their catalogue once I'd keyed my membership in.
So I paid the library a visit. Asked the very lovely librarian what e-resources they had. She looked at me a little blankly and said - "well, we have the catalogue".
"What about, say, resources for the community, for teenagers, local studies etc?" She shook her head and again pointed to the catalogue computers standing three in a row.
Miffed, I went home and thought "how do I write a blog post about nada?"
Later that week when I took my children, Sam & Aurora, to exchange their library books, I happened to notice some dusty leaflets on the counter. Lo and behold - e-resources! Library 2.0. er, stuff!
I pocketed them and went home to tackle my 2.0 blog post, wondering why on earth this information wasn't offered easily.
The brochures provided the following information:
Online information for school students:
Really just instructions on how to - you guessed it - how to use their library catalogue to find different subjects. There are vague references by way of icons to World Book Online for Kids, Britannica Online and World Book Digital Libraries and thats about it.
Another leaflet is aimed at adults and older students, and is a list of free online databases on a variety of subjects. Now this was more like it! They sites are listed below:
Greenfile - environmental
Aust/NZ Reference Centre - antipodean newspaper articles
MasterFILE Premier: Covers virtually every subject of general interest, updated daily.
Aust/NZ Points of View Reference Centre - hundreds of essays that present multiple sides of a current issue. Yowza!
Consumer Health Complete - evidence-based health news and reports.
Good Reading Online and Novelist Plus - a guide to helping readers choose fiction and non-fiction titles by way of subject or 'read-alikes' (similar to Amazon's buy-alike feature) etc. Fabbo!
Family History Databases - access to ancestory and the NSW Family History Document Services from within the library itself.
World Book & Britannica Encyclopedias - (when did the spelling of encyclopaedia change?)
The brochure also included instructions on how to access the databases.
Where was this leaflet when i was working on my darn Annotated Bibliography?!
The last leaflet is a guide to Electronic resources for world religions. It contains a link to Facts On File - World Religions Online.
Hi Jane, I have found myself in a similar situation to you with my local library's 2.0 technologies; it is surprisingly hard to find information about what they offer even though they may appear to be incredibly modern. Like you, I found that my library's OPAC was the most promoted Web 2.0 technology and it seemed to encompass all collections not any one specifically. I'm sure more focus will be placed on such services in the future, but I am surprised given the dominance of technology in today's society that they have not developed further.
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