genealogy - Public Libraries Online https://publiclibrariesonline.org A Publication of the Public Library Association Tue, 26 Jan 2016 22:02:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.5 Preserving History https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2015/12/preserving-history/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=preserving-history https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2015/12/preserving-history/#respond Tue, 29 Dec 2015 15:28:45 +0000 http://publiclibrariesonline.org/?p=7702 As anyone who has performed genealogy or local history research can attest, there are often realms of the past that we did not know about, have forgotten, or simply do not understand. Nevertheless, it is imperative to determine how this type of local-level information can be stored and made accessible.

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As public librarians, we are responsible for maintaining a collection that meets the needs of our community. This means analyzing our patrons’ focus and assessing how their preferences will evolve. Aside from the latest fiction, updated nonfiction, and reputable reference and database collections, there is an area of the collection that may be overlooked: local history. Whether it is on a village, county, or state level and whether or not it is in the form of secondary or primary material, this is an area of the collection that deserves attention.

On an international level, former librarians in Tokyo, Japan are collecting and preserving historical maps that plot out U.S. air raid damage from World War II. One of the former librarians, Gen Yamazaki has both a professional and personal connection to these maps. As a library professional during the war, he was responsible for guiding patrons to safe locations during air raid strikes. On more than one occasion, he witnessed death, tragedy, and loss of land and personal property due to these air raids.

In an effort to preserve these rare documents, he also hopes that young people will “see the discovery of such maps as a ‘milestone’ toward peace and a ‘lesson’ about the misery of war.” [1] Throughout political and social changes, history is being created within our very communities and within our library collections without even realizing it. Future generations of patrons will form their own conclusions of their community’s history based on these documents.

In my own library, we are currently working toward organizing and preparing documents for digitization so that members of the public can have equitable access to newspapers, maps, photographs, and other documents that give insight into their collective history. As anyone who has performed genealogy or local history research can attest, there are often realms of the past that we did not know about, have forgotten, or simply do not understand. Nevertheless, it is imperative to determine how this type of local-level information can be stored and made accessible.

While my library’s local history collection clearly differs from the local historical map collection that Mr. Yamazaki is preserving, it is important to for professional librarians to understand the significance of community stories and histories, as well as determine where the public library fits into the conversation.

[1] Iwakiri, Nozomi. “Ex-librarians Collect Tokyo Air Raid Maps in Effort to Promote Peace.” The Japan Times. (2015). Web. 22 Nov. 2015. http://bit.ly/1I8l63

 

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Google Books: Far More Than Just Books https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2015/10/far-more-than-just-books/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=far-more-than-just-books https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2015/10/far-more-than-just-books/#respond Tue, 20 Oct 2015 18:36:57 +0000 http://publiclibrariesonline.org/?p=7269 One of the beauties of Google Books is the ability to search the entire text of millions of items, bypassing the necessity of hunting down known items or even familiarity with the published literature on the topic. All the patron needs is the name of an ancestor or a historical curiosity to begin the search. This article will focus on ways average readers, librarians, and genealogists can enrich their research in surprising ways by the variety of materials beyond mere monographs that are contained in Google Books.

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Dorothy A. Mays is the Head of Public Services at the Olin Library at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She writes historical fiction under the pseudonym Elizabeth Camden. dmays@rollins.edu.

Google Books is such a game-changing addition to the world of librarianship that we are only beginning to grasp the wealth of its potential benefits.
Some scholars are designing techniques for algorithmic searching, text mining, and statistical analysis of the digitized books in hopes of better understanding historical eras of literature.1 Much of the press about Google Books has been consumed with its legal quagmires and copyright concerns.2 Librarians often bemoan the woefully inadequate metadata, poor search capabilities, and quality control issues.3

Putting these issues aside, I’d like to explore the hidden bounty contained within Google Books that can enrich what a public library can offer its patrons. The first stumbling block in understanding the value of this database is its name: Google Books. Yes, Google Books contains plenty of fiction and nonfiction books, but there is a wealth of non-monograph ephemera, including government documents, retail catalogs, maps, city reports, directories, and illustrations that can be mined for genealogical and historical research.

One of the beauties of Google Books is the ability to search the entire text of millions of items, bypassing the necessity of hunting down known items or even familiarity with the published literature on the topic. All the patron needs is the name of an ancestor or a historical curiosity to begin the search. This article will focus on ways average readers, librarians, and genealogists can enrich their research in surprising ways by the variety of materials beyond mere monographs that are contained in Google Books.

Size and Scope of Google Books

Within its first ten years, Google Books has grown to contain an estimated twenty million items, something it took the Library of Congress two hundred years to achieve. Given the pace at which Google is scanning and adding material, it is well on its way to becoming the world’s largest collection of books within the next decade. In partnership with more than forty research libraries and over thirty-five thousand publishers worldwide, Google is scanning and making searchable the cultural heritage of nations from around the globe. Although the majority of the books are in English, it currently contains books written in over four hundred languages.4 In a 2010 research study comparing Google Books against other major research collections, Edgar Jones found that pre-1872 content available at Google Books was comparable or superior to that of the control libraries.5

Google scans two types of materials: pre-1923 works that are in the public domain and books published in 1923 or after that are likely to still be under copyright protection. The pre-1923 books are fully searchable and almost always can be read in their entirety online. With the cooperation of over thirty-five thousand publishers and forty partner libraries, Google is also scanning books that still retain copyright. The full text of these books are searchable, but due to copyright concerns, most will only display limited pages or snippet views of the keyword searched. It is estimated that approximately 80 percent of the items in Google Books fall into this limited-access category.6

Google scans materials going back as far as the fifteenth century, although people searching for material from the nineteenth century are going to find the largest treasure trove of full-text information. The nineteenth century was an era of emerging bureaucracies, research organizations, inexpensive printing, and an explosion of commercial endeavors. Much of the paperwork generated by these groups has been scanned and included in Google Books.

Historical Research

Few public libraries have the funds or space to provide large collections of historic documents or primary sources for their Google Books patrons. Google Books solves this problem nicely, but it may take a little digging to find the relevant information.

An excellent example of the richness of Google Books for nineteenth-century research can be demonstrated by a research project I undertook to reconstruct the lives of average citizens in the months following the great Chicago Fire of 1871. Surprisingly little research has been done on this crisis, which displaced one hundred thousand people in an era before emergency relief services. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, the city government of Chicago was overwhelmed with the need to clear the rubble, rebuild streets and railroad lines, provide emergency shelter for one hundred thousand people, and import a massive amount of food and building material into the city.

A simple search in Google Books, “Chicago Fire” will pull in over three hundred thousand hits. The algorithm tends to favor currency and will push modern materials to the forefront of the results list, but the real treasures are buried deeper. Using the “search tools” limiting feature that appears under the search bar, it is possible to select a custom date range using the “any time” drop-down feature. By searching for items published only in 1871 and 1872, I retrieved only a few hundred items, but these were mostly primary documents and pure gold for someone wanting insight into what life was like in Chicago immediately after the fire. The results contain records of city council meetings, notes from insurance companies, reports from relief societies, church sermons on the fire, and personal memoirs.

Perhaps most surprising, I found reports from cities all over the country, as various relief organizations and town councils banded together to send help to Chicago. The fire was a nationwide catastrophe due to the ripple effect as hundreds of Chicago companies were plunged into bankruptcy, resulting in contracts that had to be canceled, disruption in the timber and beef industries, and the diversion of railway traffic. The crisis threw a wrench into the works of companies and industries all over the nation, and it is doubtful I would have gained this perspective had I done my research in person at Chicago-area libraries and archives. Google Books let me easily expand my search to archives across the country, leading me to serendipitous discoveries that let me study the catastrophe through a lens I had never anticipated. Many of the finds underscored the scope of the disaster as well as adding sometimes heartbreaking personal details.

In the years following the fire, a number of survivors wrote personal memoirs or accounts of their experiences. These memoirs were often cheaply published with print runs of only a few hundred copies, very few of which are extant today. These books have been scanned and made digitally available with the click of a mouse. One such book contained the texts of telegrams that flew in and out of the city during the chaotic first few days after the fire. Here is one from a shop owner telling his wife (who was visiting relatives in New York at the time of the fire) that they have lost everything: “Store and contents, dwelling and everything lost. Insurance worthless. Buy all the coffee you can and ship this afternoon by express. Don’t cry.” Stumbling across these rare and highly personal glimpses of historical life makes Google Books such a boon to people looking for a sense of life in an earlier era.

Having written a number of historical novels, I have come to rely on Google Books to reconstruct the details of nineteenth-century cities. While researching a novel set in Washington, DC, I found travel brochures that provided opening and closing times of the local museums, ticket prices for various theatres, and streetcar routes for navigating the city. Items such as telephone directories, budget reports, shopping catalogs, and social registers can also be found. In an early congressional directory I found several detailed floor plans for the U.S. Capitol in 1891. Try finding that in a post-9/11 world!

Prior to the advent of Google Books, this research would have required a trip to the cities in question, spending several weeks combing the archives and courthouse records. I estimate that my research via Google Books, due to full-text scanning capabilities and done from the comfort of my Florida home office, was faster and more complete than had I traveled to the cities in question.

Genealogy

A number of features in Google Books make it a godsend for genealogists, who are accustomed to prowling through massive archives on the hunt for fleeting references to their ancestors. Many of the resources genealogists rely on are not in Google Books: there is no systematic inclusion of census records, church archives, or passenger arrival lists. Nevertheless, Google Books contains many resources not typically used by genealogists, but the ease of full-text searching makes stumbling across serendipitous finds certainly worth any genealogist’s time.

Local Records

Cities, states, and counties were often required to compile annual reports of their activities, and a good many such reports have been scanned into Google Books. Examples of such documents include police departments, public schools, telephone companies, commodity exchanges, labor unions, and professional organizations. These groups were often required to submit annual reports of their activities, which may contain chance glimpses of a long-ago family member. Such reports chronicle the life of ordinary people. For example, a search on my grandfather’s name and city turned up his application to have electricity added to his backyard garage in 1922. This reference appeared in a list of electrical licenses included in an annual report from the city engineers. This is not the sort of material typically at the forefront of a genealogist’s hunt, but a few clicks in Google Books may turn up many unexpected glimpses into the everyday lives of ancestors.

Full-text searching works best for people with unusual names. My great-grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, had the unusual name of Josef Auchter. A search on his name reveals only a handful of references, mostly from German-language regimental histories from the late nineteenth century. He gave his son an anglicized name, and there are hundreds of references to “Joseph Auchter,” most of whom are not my grandfather. The problem of duplicate names is a familiar one for genealogists, so narrowing the search by adding a known city, profession, or additional family member is a good way to refine the initial search. Because I knew the city where my grandfather was born, I was able to identify a handful of records merely by adding “Milwaukee” to the search.

Some of the best genealogical data is held on the county level, so searching Google Books by the county name, state, and limiting it to a decade in the nineteenth century is likely to yield interesting results. A search on “Wood County” and Ohio reveals probate records, regimental histories, commemorative histories, and some court records. Not everything is available in full-text, but there are links to buy, borrow, or order a print-on-demand copy.

This brings us to another value-added feature of Google Books. A number of companies are partnering with Google to provide inexpensive paper copies of out-of-print books. I have found these services to be fast and comparatively inexpensive. When I need an old nineteenth-century book for research, I am reluctant to purchase an antique copy and subject it to the abuse and scribbled marginalia that is my preferred style of research. For ten dollars I am often able to obtain a print-on-demand copy that will allow my librarian’s soul to rest easier as I underline and dog-ear at will.

Published Genealogies

A rich source of genealogy information can be the published oral histories; family genealogies; or the histories of a county, township, or village. These monographs are generally still under copyright protection, and Google may display only the snippet containing the search term. In such cases, this snippet view may provide enough information for the patron to request a scan of the relevant pages from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, the largest genealogical research library in the world. Patrons who can provide a complete citation to a desired piece of information may email their request to the Family History Library and receive up to five image shots per month. The library reports that following their announcement of this service they received thousands of requests located through these limited snippet views in Google Books.

The lack of organization in Google Books may prove frustrating to librarians accustomed to complete catalog records, as these items usually lack metadata and reflect a wildly uneven collection of items. Because Google leans heavily on their forty participating research libraries, the geographic regions surrounding those universities are better represented than other areas. Lack of reliable cataloging aside, the full-text search capabilities make moving through the records comparatively quick and painless.

The erratic nature of the quality and quantity of materials found using Google Books cannot be emphasized enough. A city like Chicago will have a rich set of results because of Google’s partnership with Northwestern University. Other geographic regions and subject areas will not be so well served, but with over a million new items being scanned and added each year, researchers should periodically revisit Google Books to see if anything of interest has appeared.

Primary Research

For a comprehensive search on a specific topic, Google Books is once again likely to produce a colorful and diverse set of documents that trace a historic event as it unfolds. A good example is the massive engineering project to fill in Boston’s Back Bay. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Boston undertook the nation’s most ambitious landfill project by filling many of the bays and inlets along its shoreline, a project that ultimately created over a thousand acres of new land. Most of this work was done between 1855 and 1894, and was well-documented.

A search on “Back Bay” and Boston, limited to full-text items from the nineteenth century will yield a tremendous variety of documents including:

  • maps of the ongoing landfill progress;
  • full text of city council reports on the project;
  • reports from the city’s engineering office;
  • financial documents relating to funding and expenditures;
  • guide books for the city; and
  • real estate brochures for the newly available tracts of land, houses, and shops built in the Back Bay.

Because of Google’s full-text searching, some of the results from the above query will be only tenuously related to the Back Bay, such as Clark’s Boston Blue Book: Ladies Visiting and Shopping Guide published in 1900, and containing over six hundred pages of club memberships, photographs, seating charts for Boston theatres, and the address and function of local municipal agencies. The Back Bay is mentioned only for some of its sporting clubs and dining establishments. Perhaps the most interesting feature of this book for those thirsty for trivia is the advertisements that promoted everything from banking, pharmaceuticals, and millinery to cab services.

Search Recommendations

One of the frustrations with Google Books is the lack of traditional cataloging. For example, trying to find an early telephone directory for a particular city can be a challenge because in the late nineteenth century this item might be called a guide, customer list, telegraphic address book, register, or perhaps “the Buffalo Directory.” People using Google Books need to have patience and the desire to hunt through immense lists of items in hopes of serendipitously stumbling across something of interest.

The lack of traditional cataloging also means there is no safety net to catch variations in spelling. This is especially important to keep in mind when searching British versus American spelling. As most genealogists are aware, variants in proper names are common in census and other historical records, but search operators can work, for example: Schwartz Josef OR Joseph OR Josephus will produce all three variants of spelling.

Although Google Books suffers from poor metadata, all the items are coded with year of publication and can be searched by specific date range. This means if you wish to research the state of technical or social awareness during a specific time frame, it is easy to search for scientific reports limited to a chronological era. Google Books is particularly rich in US government documents, and the abundance of scientific reports from the Smithsonian and research organizations (for example, the Agriculture Department, the Weather Bureau, the Patent Office, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Ethnology), make it easy to generate a set of concise reports. These government reports are excellent windows into the state of knowledge during your defined time frame.

Another way to glean insight into the state of knowledge during a particular era is to consult an early edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica for the year closest to your time period. Hunting through this monumental encyclopedia can be a challenge, but it is an excellent and comprehensive
source for documenting the state of human knowledge from 1768 to the present (although full-text searching ceases with 1923).

Conclusion

Although the majority of items in Google Books are indeed “books,” I think it is more useful if librarians consider it to be a source of information rather than any kind of traditional set of books. Google Books is full of brochures, product manuals, directories, maps, church records, newsletters, government documents, and a huge range of ephemera. Other than the ability to refine your search by a specific year of publication, there are no sophisticated search capabilities. It is like dipping a bucket into a deep well, holding your breath, and praying you’ll find something of interest
in the vast results you pull up into the light of day. You will generally find something interesting, but it will require plenty of hunting and pecking.

One of the biggest frustrations our users typically have is managing their expectation for full text. There are two possible solutions for this:

  1. Limit results to “free Google eBooks” under the “Any Book” dropdown option.
  2. Make use of the in-demand printing option. For out-of-print books, it is usually affordable and has a fast turnaround.

For the librarians who fear Google Books or bemoan its lack of satisfactory cataloging, perhaps it will be comforting to learn of the experience at the University of Complutense in Madrid. After partnering with Google and having thousands of their books loaded into Google Books, they noticed a spike in circulation of the items that were made available in digital copies. This is curious because Complutense provided Google only with books in the public domain, and these books were viewable in their entirety online. The mere presence of these digital copies appeared to have sparked interest in the paper copies that was not noticed among the university’s books of similar age and topics that had not been digitized by Google. Their assumption is that Google generates more exposure to the book, which ultimately redounds to the print copy.7

Despite its immense size, Google Books is still in its infancy. Since its introduction in 2004, it has been the target of copyright lawsuits and deep suspicion of its potential to create a corporate monopoly over the world’s cultural heritage. Love it or hate it, Google Books represents one of the most significant developments in the last century of librarianship. Its poor indexing and search capabilities are overshadowed by the ease of its full-text search capabilities and the wonderful ephemera that enriches its holdings far beyond mere “books.”

References and Notes

  1. See for example, Mark Davies, “Making Google Books n-grams Useful for a Wide Range of Research on Language Change,” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19, no. 3 (2014): 401–16; Paula Findlen, “How Google Rediscovered the 19th Century,” Chronicle of Higher Education (Aug. 2, 2013): B2; Andrew Stauffer, “The Nineteenth-Century Archive in the Digital Age,” European Romantic Review 23, no. 3 (2012): 335–41.
  2. See for example, Clarice Castro and Ruy de Queiroz, “The Song of Sirens: Google Books Project and Copyright in a Digital Age,” Information, Communication & Society 16, no. 9 (2013): 1441–455; Marina Lao, “The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good: The Antitrust Objections to the Google Book Settlement,” Antitrust Law Journal 78 (2012): 397–442; Alok Sharma, “Google Book and Copyright: A Critical Perspective,” Social Science Research Network (2013), accessed Sept. 23, 2014.
  3. See for example, Millie Jackson, “Using Metadata to Discover the Buried Treasure in Google Book Search,” Journal of Library Administration 47, nos. 1–2 (2008): 165–73; Ryan James and Andrew Weiss, “An Assessment of Google Books’ Metadata,” Journal of Library Metadata 12, no. 1 (2012): 15–22; Julia T. Pope and Robert P. Holley, “Google Book Search and Metadata,” Cataloging and Classification Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2011): 1–13.
  4. Peter Baron, “The Library of the Future: Google’s Vision for Books,” Learned Publishing 24, no. 3 (2011): 198.
  5. Edgar Jones, “Google Books as a General Research Collection,” Library Resources & Technical Services 54, no. 2 (2010): 77–89.
  6. Castro and de Queiroz, “Song of the Sirens,” 1448.
  7. Suzanne Bjørner, “Complutense University of Madrid: Different Language, Similar Experience,” Searcher 15, no. 4 (2007): 22.

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Historical Context for Genealogy Research: What Your Ancestor’s Surroundings Say About Them https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2014/06/historical-context-for-genealogy-research-what-your-ancestors-surroundings-say-about-them/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=historical-context-for-genealogy-research-what-your-ancestors-surroundings-say-about-them https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2014/06/historical-context-for-genealogy-research-what-your-ancestors-surroundings-say-about-them/#respond Wed, 04 Jun 2014 21:42:40 +0000 http://publiclibrariesonline.org/?p=4396 When conducting genealogical research on your family, understanding the life and times of your ancestors is more than just who they were and when they were born and died. Situating your ancestors in history, both local and national, can help clue you in to more about their daily lives and about some of the decisions they may have faced during their time. In addition, knowing about the historical context that these men and women faced can provide vital clues that can help you unearth more information about them than by just conducting random searches.
What is historical context? Historical context is the elements that permeate the lives of every living person; the local history of where they were born, the events that may have shaped their lives, and the living conditions that often can provide some measure of explanation about who they were as people. For example, if you know in advance that the local county courthouse burned down and that many records were destroyed, you will know that you will have to find other avenues to locate records and documents that you might need.

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When conducting genealogical research on your family, understanding the life and times of your ancestors is more than just who they were and when they were born and died. Situating your ancestors in history, both local and national, can help clue you in to more about their daily lives and about some of the decisions they may have faced during their time. In addition, knowing about the historical context that these men and women faced can provide vital clues that can help you unearth more information about them than by just conducting random searches.

What is historical context? Historical context is the elements that permeate the lives of every living person; the local history of where they were born, the events that may have shaped their lives, and the living conditions that often can provide some measure of explanation about who they were as people. For example, if you know in advance that the local county courthouse burned down and that many records were destroyed, you will know that you will have to find other avenues to locate records and documents that you might need.

So how do you situate your ancestors in historical context? Start with your local public library. Many public libraries keep reference materials about the location in which they are found that can include history, prominent citizens, city directories, genealogy books about first families in the area, and many other tidbits that can be of use to your research. Don’t forget to keep records of what sources you have looked at as you go! Make notes of where you found the book(s) so you can always retrace your steps should the unthinkable happen and your research gets lost or destroyed.

If you don’t have access to the public library in the area you are researching, try the local historical societies. These treasure troves of information can lead to resources you never knew existed! A simple Google search can reveal numerous historical societies. Do not be afraid to reach out to them for assistance, especially if you are working in the South. The United States South can prove to be quite difficult to conduct research in beyond a certain point. Due to the widespread destruction caused by the American Civil War, many sources of records were lost. This can be quite a frustrating experience, but by using local historical societies you can begin to piece together the history of the area. Many small historical societies are run by individuals with direct connections to the people, places, and things that you may want to know, so do not be afraid to ask questions. You never know when someone will tell you that they knew so-and-so who happened to know your grandfather. This happened to me during my own genealogical research, and the resulting information proved to be quite useful indeed. Genealogy research is a lot like detective work—you have to piece together the past in order to understand the motives and actions of your ancestors. While this can be a painstaking process, the rewards are worth it.

In my next article, we will be looking at the United States Census records including what they show, how to read them and where to find them. Keep researching—the answers are out there!

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New Product News – Nov/Dec 2012 https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2012/12/new-product-news-novdec-2012/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-product-news-novdec-2012 https://publiclibrariesonline.org/2012/12/new-product-news-novdec-2012/#respond Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:38:06 +0000 http://publiclibrariesonline.org/?p=848 Gale, part of Cengage Learning, recently announced the launch of Gale Genealogy Connect, a new online tool for genealogical research.

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Gale Answers Question, “Who Am I?”

Gale, part of Cengage Learning, recently announced the launch of Gale Genealogy Connect, a new online tool for genealogical research. Focusing on the “how to” of genealogical research, along with unique source materials, Gale Genealogy Connect serves as a compliment to popular fact-, date-, and people-based genealogy resources already on the market. Sourced from the publications of Genealogical. com, parent company for Genealogical Publishing Company and Clearfield Company, Gale Genealogy Connect features more than 550 reference works at release (formerly only available in print or on CD-ROM) on a standalone e-book platform, with a goal of growing the collection to nearly 1,500 works. The content covers a wide range of topics such as genealogy research basics; genealogy methods and sources; colonial genealogy; immigration; and royal and Native American ancestry. Gale Genealogy Connect serves both novice and advanced researchers—beginners will learn proper research methods and how to define and organize goals, while powerful search features help advanced researchers make connections among data to uncover a meaningful story behind their family tree. Additional features include:

  • an engaging user interface with translation into thirty-eight languages;
  • unlimited and simultaneous 24/7 access;
  • seamless cross-searching across all Gale Genealogy Connect collections;
  • ability to print, save, email, or share articles; and
  • multipage PDF viewing recreating the book experience.

Content is divided into six convenient bundles, giving libraries a variety of purchase and subscription options to meet their needs.

Scholastic Expands Storia Content

Storia is Scholastic’s free downloadable children’s e-reading app and e-book system that grows with children from toddlers to teens. Available for free download on PC, iPad, iPhone, all iOS systems hardware, and Android tablets, the Storia e-reading app is designed to captivate kids while helping them become better readers. Storia offers more than two thousand titles for kids from toddlers through teens with more content being added daily. Storia was recognized with the Editor’s Choice Award for children’s e-book apps in the May 2012 edition of Children’s Technology Review. Scholastic has announced agreements with National Geographic for Kids and Albert Whitman & Company. Among the National Geographic for Kids titles to be offered on Storia are twenty titles from the bestselling series “National Geographic Readers.” Scholastic is currently working with several other publishers to provide their front- and backlist titles on Storia.

Codeacademy Offers Easy On-Ramp for Coding Clubs

Digital literacy is increasingly important for kids as more of their world goes online. In response to the lack of computer science (CS) opportunities for kids, Codeacademy has put together a startup kit. They believe that programming teaches important reasoning, logic, and communication skills, and that learning programming gives kids a voice in how software shapes their world. The kit contains everything needed to offer after-school programming clubs and other CS opportunities including a full curriculum, accounts for the students, flyers, letters to parents, and more. And because the lessons are self-paced, program facilitators and club leaders do not need to be expert programmers. Best of all, it’s completely free. Teachers and librarians can also sign up for a free after-school programming kit.

Lessons run right in the browser, with no downloads or installation required. They are self-guided, freeing facilitators to work with learners one-on-one; and self-paced with a choice of languages (Python, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS), so it’s easy to scale the class up or down. Everything is packaged for easy launch, including access to a custom forum for teachers and librarians to share best practices and swap ideas.

VTLS Releases MozGo

With library budgets strained and staff already struggling to manage, keeping pace presents a challenge. Libraries want an affordable and reliable app that will provide the features patrons want without imposing additional work for already overburdened systems staff. Recognizing this need for a consistent, full-featured app that will make lives easier for both patrons and staff, VTLS developed MozGo. The name derives from the Hungarian word for mobile (mozgó).

MozGo employs an innovative cloud-based “mobile mediator” to provide a flexible solution that can be used with almost any integrated library system (ILS). VTLS applies the library’s branding to the MozGo app, tailoring it to each library. The deployment process is simple: the application is distributed to patrons through the iTunes Store or Android Marketplace under the library’s name. Using the Mobile Mediator, MozGo connects directly to the library catalog to provide real-time information. Once deployed, no extra work is needed to support new ILS versions, or even entirely different ILS implementations at your library. MozGo is based on a new open VTLS platform, Open Skies.

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