National Parks “Every Kid in a Park” Initiative Underway

Posted on October 14, 2015

By Jan Snyder

“Because no matter who you are, no matter where you live, our parks, our monuments, our lands, our waters – these places are your birthright as Americans.”
– President Barack Obama

This year begins a new exciting adventure for 4th grade students across the nation, along with their families.  Through the Every Kid in a Park initiative, each student/family is eligible for a free parks pass that will allow them to enter, without cost, any national park, monument, reserve, lands or waters until August 31, 2016.  (It does not cover additional fees such as camping, boats, or tours.) No matter where you live in the U.S. you are less than two hours from any of the 2,000 included sites!

Learn how the program works, get a pass, plan a trip, find teacher activities to support the initiative, and get tips for parents or guardians. Many school districts are creating wonderful teacher resources to support the initiative as well.  Our neighboring school district, Portland Public Schools, has published a supporting website with teaching materials to support the Every Kid in a Park program.

Oregon City school libraries’ staff plans to be involved with this project all year.  We will be printing individual passes for all 4th grade students in our district (each has a unique code.). As our elementary students visit the library weekly, one library class a month will be used at the 4th grade level to focus on a different national park.  We have a variety of resources at our fingertips to help with this process:

Read moreNational Parks “Every Kid in a Park” Initiative Underway

Fall into Literary Genre Fiction

By Holly Hibner and Mary Kelly

Literary fiction “tends to focus on complex issues and the beauty of the writing itself,” according to the Writer’s Relief Staff at the Huffington Post (1). This is a great definition, and makes a distinction between literary fiction and mainstream or “popular” fiction, which is driven more by plot and characters than by insight or clever use of language.  It seems short sighted to think that literary writing falls only outside of genre fiction, though. There are plenty of literary mysteries, literary science fiction novels, and even literary graphic novels. I’d like to suggest that literary fiction can, in fact, fall into a variety of genres and still hold true to the definition above.

Read moreFall into Literary Genre Fiction

Job Hunting Isn’t What it Used to Be

Note to librarians: This blog post is for you to share! If you have this title, be sure to link it to your GVRL collection. If you don’t have this title and want to learn more, access a free trial today!  

 

Resumes without special formatting… online applications… no phone calls… social media networking… computer-based screening…

If you’ve ever tried to explain the current processes for applying for a job to a grandparent (or maybe even a parent), you have a sense of how much it has changed in the last 20 years. And it continues to change. Today’s impersonal process can be confusing and off-putting to even the most determined job seekers.

Find information about careers, job hunting, and more
To support people in our community who are looking for new opportunities – whether for a job change or a new career – the library provides free access to a great resource: Life & Career Skills: Employment.

Read moreJob Hunting Isn’t What it Used to Be

Introducing Gale EduCast

Introducing Gale EduCast, innovative solutions, ideas, and perspectives for faculty and librarians leading the charge in education. Join us as we identify a problem, provide a solution and the story behind the solution, and answer your questions.

Upcoming Gale EduCasts:

October 14 @ 1:30 pm ET 

Gale Virtual Reference Library is the platform for building an online collection of specialized reference sources and scholarly monographs, also known as eBooks, for multidisciplinary research. In addition to being the premier research environment for the Gale published imprints, such as Macmillan Reference USA, Charles Scribner’s Sons, and St. James Press, and others, GVRL offers an ideal user experience for content from more than 100 partner publishers, including Sage, Lippincott Williams & Wilkens, and Elsevier.

Read moreIntroducing Gale EduCast

Unrivaled Source for Note Taking

Chapter 16 in Professional Genealogy. A Manual for Researchers, Writers, Editors, Lecturers, and Librarians, edited by Elizabeth Shown Mills, covers the topic of Note-Taking.  Entitled “Transcripts and Abstracts,” and written by Mary McCampbell Bell, this chapter offers rock-solid guidance on the taking of genealogical notes. It’s sorely needed by every researcher—professional or not—because everyone takes research notes. 

Read moreUnrivaled Source for Note Taking

Research In Context Meets the Needs of Middle Grade Students

“Teaching middle school is an adventure not a job,” says author and educator, Angela K. Bennett. There’s no doubt grades 6 to 8 are among the most important for young teens and pre-teens to develop learning skills to launch them into high school and beyond. And until now, resources to support an integrated learning adventure have been few and far between, making teaching and supporting learning for this curious group a challenge. But the tide is turning with a new highly-visual resource featuring authoritative content that’s been designed specifically for middle school learners.

Read moreResearch In Context Meets the Needs of Middle Grade Students

Content Updates for Gale’s In Context (week ending 10/9/2015)

Posted on October 8, 2015

New content has been added and existing content updated in a number of Gale’s In Context products.

Biography In Context
New homepage spotlights have been posted that include the “hotspot” feature. This feature allows users to hover over portions of an image on the home page enabling a pop-up window to appear with fast facts about the topic or links to additional content.

Spotlights for October are:

Read moreContent Updates for Gale’s In Context (week ending 10/9/2015)

Content Updates for Kids InfoBits (week ending 10/9/2015)

Posted on October 8, 2015 New “infobits” have been added to the homepage for October. Categories and subjects covered include: People: Halloween Technology: iPod revealed in 2001 Social Studies: Columbus Day and Thanksgiving Day in Canada Plants: Rose as National Flower Science: First Motion Picture Arts: Landscape Painting Animals: Turkeys    Air Jordan 1 Retro … Read more

TEL & Career Transitions: Connecting People with Jobs

By Steven Hicks and Kim Martin

For job seekers, libraries play a crucial role in career discovery, development, and overall assistance. In fact, almost one quarter of library visitors are there to look or apply for a job, according to the Pew Research Center. 1. To further solidify the library’s role as a hub for employment resources, in July, 2014 President Obama signed into law the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, identifying public libraries as potential partners of the American Job Center network, and acknowledging libraries’ ability to provide an expansive array of job search services.

Career Transitions, an online resource from Gale, assists users with career exploration and offers a complete, personalized and guided experience from assessing strengths and interests, to finding new career opportunities, to ultimately completing professional resumes and improving the chances of landing jobs.

Read moreTEL & Career Transitions: Connecting People with Jobs

Gale Technical Solutions: Organizing Electronic Resource Pages

By Scott Steward

Let’s talk about some best practices for organizing electronic resource pages.

It doesn’t matter if you are an academic, K12, public, or special library; if you boil down what we do to its simplest definition, our primary goal is to connect people to information.

Our users are already using tools like Google and Bing in their everyday lives to find information.  E.g. Who makes the best cup of coffee? What is the cheapest flight to Las Vegas? What is the carrying weight of a swallow? 

Read moreGale Technical Solutions: Organizing Electronic Resource Pages