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January 26th, 2008 Brian Herzog
A patron came up to the desk and said:
I keep hearing on the news about other states’ primaries and caucuses. I know it’s for the President, but what’s the big deal? We don’t vote until November, right? What’s the difference between a caucus and a primary? What happens if you don’t win them? Does Massachusetts have one? And I keep hearing good and bad things about all the candidates - who is winning?
I love easy questions like this.
I knew the Massachusetts primary is coming up, so the first thing I wanted to do is search the state’s website for information on that. While doing that, I tried to give a brief description of the whole primary/caucus system: candidates win delegates in each state, who then cast votes in the party conventions to decide who actually runs for President…
By this time I had found a few Massachusetts resources:
- MA Elections Division, which listed the primary’s date (Feb. 5th), as well as lots of information on both state- and national-level elections
- The Voting Process website, which explained how to register, how to apply for an absentee ballot, what do to and where to go on election day, and more
At this point, the patron confessed that she was far more interested in who was winning than in how the process itself worked. A website I found a few weeks ago is perfect to answer this: CNN Election Center 2008.
I like this website for the same reason I don’t like USAToday - it breaks everything down into easy to understand chunks, and does so with lots of colors and graphs. It lists who has won each primary/caucus so far, and how many delegates each candidate has earned.
It also explains the major issues and where each candidate stands, has an easy-to-use calendar for upcoming primaries and caucuses, shows which candidates have dropped out, how much money each candidate has raised and spent, and more.
All in all, it seems like a fairly complete election coverage source. And it satisfied the patron (actually, it outright delighted her to see Ron Paul has won more delegates than Rudy Giuliani even though Giuliani has spent $30.6 million to Paul’s $2.8 million). She wrote down the url and promised to read more about the issues before Feb. 5th.
I was curious, though - even though I think CNN is a reliable source, I also wanted to see what other election coverage and resources were available. I spent some time searching, and here’s what I came up with, broken down by type:
Election News Coverage:
Campaign Finances:
Election/Voting Resources:
Political Parties and National Conventions:
I didn’t bother linking directly to each candidates’ website, because many of the sites above do that. In fact, since they’re all reporting on the same thing, most of the information on these sites is duplicated. I guess the point is to pick at least one resource you trust and stay informed.
2008, campaign, candidates, election, elections, libraries, library, politics, president, presidential, public, question, reference, reference question
Tags: 2008, campaign, candidates, election, elections, libraries, Library, politics, president, presidential, public, question, reference, Reference Question See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 1 Comment »
January 12th, 2008 Brian Herzog
Sometimes, even before the patron has said anything, I just know that they are going to qualify for “Reference Question of the Week.”
A couple in their sixties or seventies walked up to the desk, and the wife takes charge:
We just got back from my son’s house, and while we were gone it snowed. I know it, because there’s snow in my yard. What I want you to tell me is how much snow there is. My neighbor told me it snowed on December 13th and again on the 16th, and you have to tell me how much snow it snowed in them storms.
Well, I told her that it would take me some time to find this information, and that I’d call her when I did. I took down her number, and over the course of the next couple hours, searched for some kind of snowfall record in between helping other patrons.
The first place I always try for weather data is NOAA. I tried various searches in Google and restricted to the noaa.gov site, but didn’t have much luck. I did find snowfall monitoring data files, which seemed promising because each file was for a specific month and year, broken down by day, and covered lots of cities in every state. However, the nearest city to this patron’s yard didn’t have data, so that didn’t help.
I also found the National Climatic Data Center, which is the “World’s largest archive of climate data.” However, the free data they offered unfortunately didn’t address this question.
So, I kept searching. I must tried twenty different ways to find this data, from scanning news reports from days after these storms to trying to contact local weather monitoring stations for their data to checking snowfalls at nearby airports. But in every case, either the data was missing, or the station was too far away to extrapolate to this woman’s yard, or the data wasn’t free, or the website seemed too unreliable to even bother with.
Then, happily, a colleague of mine walked by, and I asked her to help me out. I was getting frustrated, and I hoped a new approach to the problem would produce something useful.
We both looked, and found the Weather Underground’s historical data about the same time. This was a wonderful little tool, letting us search by zip code and date. But the “precipitation” listed for that day was much lower than we expected. I remember getting about 8 inches of snow in each storm, but wunderground was reporting 0.81 inches.
Eventually we decided they were reporting “precipitation” as the equivalent of rainfall, not the snow that accumulated. This realization led us on a tangent to see if we could find a formula to convert inches of rain to inches of snow.
Even though the formulas we found actually did convert the wunderground data into snowfall levels close to what we expected, we decided this was still questionable research, at best, and kept on.
And it was then that my colleague found it.
She tried a simple search for “snowfall chelmsford,” and noticed the url of one of the returns was accuweather.com linking in to their current weather report for North Chelmsford. At the bottom of that page was a link to a Past Weather Check.
Although this data only seems to go back one month, it was far enough to cover the two dates the patron provided. And, best of all, it gave both precipitation and snowfall, for our exact zip code.
This came about three hours after the patron originally asked me the question, and with much relief I called her to give her the amounts. Even her response, “yeah, that’s about what my neighbor said” [click] couldn’t dampen my spirits after answering this one (with a tremendous amount of help from a coworker, of course).
But recent-past questions like this are always tough, especially weather questions. It’s easier to find what the weather was like years ago than what it was like a week ago, which just seems wrong to me. But as long as I keep bookmarking these resources, maybe next time the answer will come a bit quicker.
Incidentally, Accuweather.com said we got 10.1″ of snow on the 13th and 7.6″ on the 16th. That means I shoveled 17.7″ that weekend, at my house and at the library.
amount, archive, historical, libraries, library, public, reference question, snow, snowfall, totals, weather
Tags: amount, archive, historical, libraries, Library, public, Reference Question, snow, snowfall, totals, weather See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 5 Comments »
January 10th, 2008 Brian Herzog
A few months ago I got an email about a website called Access NewspaperARCHIVE, saying that libraries could signup for free access to historical newspapers, dating back to the 1700s.
Sweet. I’m always looking for good primary source resources, especially online ones (and especially-especially free ones), so I thought I’d check this out. The signup process was a bit odd, having to download and then fax in their signup form [pdf, 418 kb]. I didn’t hear anything back from them for months, so one day I just tried their url again (from within the library) and it IP-authenticated me.
So, I took that as us being signed up, and I started playing. The database is neat, as all the newspapers in there are saved as PDF files (see the 7/29/1895 Sandusky Register). And some are older than I could find in our other available resources, so those are two great things in its favor. However, I did see some drawbacks:
- In-Library use only. And right on the authenticated homepage (the one patrons would see by logging in at the library) is a link to “Sign up for a home account.” Which isn’t expensive, but it’s not free. It’s just a little bit underhanded to give libraries a free account and then use that as a vehicle to sell to our patrons. So, I bypass this page and go right to the Browse page
- No keyword searching. You can only browse by location, date, or newspaper title. Which will be fine for the “what happened on my birthday” questions, or if you were just looking up anything old in your area, but eliminates searching for a topic. And, the browse tool and the results listing are kind of clunky
- No Massachusetts Newspapers. Which is a pain, since I mainly serve Massachusetts patrons. So, I guess no local historical information for me
- Front pages only? For the papers I viewed, it wasn’t the entire paper but just the front page. That’s a pain
- Not high-quality scans. The newspapers are legible, both on screen and printed, but they are just a little bit too bitmapped. And they are images, rather than text-based, which means no copy/pasting
So, my overall verdict is this: it’s an amazing resource for primary source newspapers, and it’s free, so it’s better than nothing. There are some drawbacks, but I am rarely completely satisfied anyway.
Something else I did like was they had a “Questions? Ask a Librarian” link. This is an email link to whatever email address you supplied on the signup form. Which is good, since my patrons using this will be able to write to me, instead of this company.
Anyway, this is available, so I’m going to give it a try. If anyone has experience with this company or database, please comment below and let us know what you think. Thanks.
access, database, databases, historic, historical, libraries, library, newspaper, newspaperarchive, newspapers, primary, public, source, sources
Tags: access, database, databases, historic, historical, libraries, Library, newspaper, newspaperarchive, newspapers, primary, public, source, sources See Also
Posted under Library, Resources | 3 Comments »
December 15th, 2007 Brian Herzog
A high school student walks up to the desk and asks if there are any “picture programs” on the computers.
After a bit more questioning, I realize he’s looking for a photo editor, like Photoshop. It turns out he was joining some online group, and needed an image for his avatar. He wanted to crop a picture of himself from his friend’s myspace account, and use just the t-shirt he was wearing in that picture to be his avatar.
(Quite the far cry from helping a student find information on European explorers for a homework project, but you answer the question you’re asked.)
Unfortunately, my library doesn’t have any kind of photo editing software on the public computers (not even MS Paint). Perhaps because of this, I’ve been paying attention to mentions of online photo editors, so I had something to offer this kid.
I personally have used Pixenate (or, PXN8) a couple times. It allows most of the basic photo editing functions, and doesn’t require you to create an account to use it. This is what I showed the student, and we were able to save the photo from myspace to the harddrive, crop it accordingly, resize it, and upload the result as his avatar.
I like to think that this high school kid has new respect for the library as a high tech mecca, but since I need to tell this particular kid regularly not to swear in the library, “respect” might not be the right word.
Anyway, here’s a roundup of online photo editor posts I’ve seen recently (along with a few other image-related posts, for good measure):
I’m sure there are more out there, and that everyone has their favorite. I’m going to keep my eye on Splashup, and in the meantime stick with Pixenate for the simple stuff.
image, libraries, library, online photo editors, picture, public libraries, public library, reference question, tools, web-based
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Posted under Library, Resources, Technology | 1 Comment »
December 6th, 2007 Brian Herzog
This doesn’t have much to do with libraries, but I like crossword puzzles and thought it was neat:
A recent discussion on ME-LIBS mentioned the puzzlemaker, from Discovery Education. This website automatically generates crossword puzzles (and other types of puzzles, too) from a list of words and clues you enter.
It’s fun. Not quite the New York Times puzzle, of course, but then again, I’m not quite Will Shortz.
One drawback is that it just generates the puzzle to a webpage, which you’re then supposed to print out. A “play online” version would be more fun; also helpful would be a print-friendly pdf version (I had to tweak my Library 2.0 Crossword in Word before printing to pdf).
While looking for one with more output options, I found that there seems to be a lot of software to generate puzzles, but only a few are free:
This could be used as a fun library program for kids or teens, for staff, for making an activity to go along with a book display, for local history/events/landmarks, or even for a book display on crosswords (incidentally, the first crossword puzzle was complied by Arthur Wynne and appeared in the New York World on Dec. 21st, 1913).
creator, crossword, crosswords, maker, online, puzzle, puzzles
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Posted under Library, Resources | 1 Comment »
