The beginning of the school year is a whirlwind for everyone. Students have growing reading goals, parents have busy schedules, and teachers are always planning their next lesson. In other words: there’s a lot of hoopla surrounding a brand new school year, especially for young readers.
So, how do you contend with the hoopla? Hoopla!
Yes, this is the hoopla we’ve been excited about.
Hoopla makes finding the digital resources you need easy for everyone!
With their timely and convenient Back to School Collection, finding eBooks for elementary students is a breeze. Hoopla’s curated selections of #BacktoSchool eBooks puts everything in one place — like this collection of Back to School Confidence eBooks, helpful for those students (…and parents…and teachers) who are looking to muster a little extra self-assurance to start the new school year strong.
Photo by SurveyHacks
Start exploring hoopla today and find exactly what you’re looking for! All you need to get started is your library card.
The more hours I put into the Information Services Desk at Cooper-Siegel, the more requests for academic information I field. One particular challenge spawned a wild-goose chase for a specific article from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The article, Atrial Fibrillation by Gregory F. Michaud, M.D., et al., published in 2021, was a specific request from a patron looking for medical advice. So, I cracked my knuckles and dove into the obvious ACLA resources.
My first stop was the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Research Resources page. Full of research materials, I narrowed my search to medical, specifically searching for NEJM. No dice! At this point, I knew searching for a specific and recent article from a major medical journal was going to take some serious Google Fu (desperate, skilled, and persistent online searching).
The next platform of discovery was PubMed. A long-standing, government-run database of over 34 million citations of biomedical literature. PubMed is a great resource for academic, peer-reviewed medical information, albeit anything beyond abstracts (and still, most of those…) are beyond my reckoning. Alas, another roll of the dice and coming up snake eyes on NEJM.
The third stop on this runaway academic search took me to NEJM’s website. Perhaps, beyond logic, I would be gifted with a free preview or something of the like. Unfortunately, like most academic journals, all recent publications were wrapped up tight behind a paywall or sign-up-to-get-X-articles-free account creation. Growing desperate, I turned to an old friend.
The saving grace of many an ill-fated undergraduate research paper, Google Scholar has been there to coddle the most wretched of researchers since 2004. A helpful index of millions of academic articles, Scholar also features a terribly beneficial “cited by” metric, which measures the article’s popularity and usefulness to other academics. I started with the obvious search: “Atrial Fibrillation.” Turns out, this condition is a popular research topic. Then, I tightened my search using the author’s full name and narrowing the date to 2021.
Bingo.
By the grace of the Israeli Association of Emergency Medicine, a file appeared. The full pdf of Atrial Fibrillation (2021)! Breathing a sigh of relief, I downloaded it and swiftly sent it off to the inquiring patron, my quest finished at last.
I wish I had some sort of explanation as to why in the world this specific article was available through this specific organization, and why it popped up on Google Scholar, but, as with all research, it is good to keep in mind: sometimes, you just get lucky.
Happy hunting.
Cameron R.S. Smith | Cooper-Siegel Community Library
P.S. If anyone has any suggestions, recommendations, or advice on how else to tackle the above conundrum or other, similar requests, I am all ears! Don’t hesitate to contact me at: smithc2@coopersiegelcommunitylibrary.org.
With the school year right around the corner, back-to-school shopping is in full swing! Consumer Reports is a go-to resource to equip people with the credible, trustworthy information they needed to make informed choices. Not only does CR provide reviews, they also have helpful articles on finding the best deals, health advice and so much more. Check out some of the reviews, recommendations and articles they have to help students of all ages have a successful school year!
Do you love magazines but don’t want to pack a separate bag just to take them to the beach? Or are there some magazines you just can’t find at your local grocery store? Or do you get sticker shock over the price of the specialty magazines?
Your patrons have probably said most if not all of these things about magazines. If they have you should make sure that they know all about Flipster and Overdrive Magazines. They can check out many of the most popular titles and they are always available. There are even titles for patrons who speak another language!
