A really wonderful thing happened to me tonight. The cork in my wine bottle busted as it was retracting. BUT WAIT. THAT’S NOT ALL. I finally found myself applying knowledge gained from Lifehacker in REAL life – not just my techno life. I recalled a post about opening a bottle of wine with your shoe and immediately set to it. Being timid it took me about 10 knocks against the wooden door frame – but that little bitch of a cork popped – and I was extremely happy.
I also had two valid reference questions today that I totally rocked out. The one I’ll mention was from an education student at a local university who was looking for information on Resource Rooms in Special Education.
I have no idea what Resource Rooms in Special Education means – so I did a quick google search and fell onto the about.com web page that gave me a little bit of background. I knew pretty much off the bat that we weren’t going to have much in the public library on the topic, especially in our print materials. The student related that she had already been through WilsonSelect and ERIC without much success. She said she had found one article that she Interloaned from 2000, but it wasn’t enough, and that she wasn’t finding much at her University Library.
I did a quick keyword search for “resource room special education” in ERIC and came up with something from 2008. But she was right, this was gonna be a little bit narrow on the results. I’m not familiar enough with educational terms to do the whole synonym thing – so my next step was to head to Google Scholar with the author’s name as a search.
We found the original article and I pointed out how Google Scholar shows you who has cited the article – and how you can use that to kinda expand your search. (Forgive me, but I’ve forgotten the official citation search database I was using at WSU — somebody refresh my memory please.) Then – once she grabbed the journal names that the articles were in – she could likely use her University’s resources more wisely. Her professor had enlightened her to ERIC and WilsonSelect – but something was nagging at me that she had failed to mention the specific journals as opposed to the conglomerate databases.
The end result was that she walked out with what I’m going to take as a swing in her step – a little confidence – ready to do the business herself. It really saved MY day today – almost as much as my sole.
*edit* Oh. I almost forgot to mention Google Reader Play. There. I mentioned it.
