Data Chatter

We have such a looooooong list of databases available here, that sometimes it seems overwhelming when you need to find something. Most of them aren't terribly useful for us down here, but some are fun.

Sanborn maps is one of my favorites to play with. The downside is that once you've used it to find your house throughout the last hundred or so years, there's no need to go back and revisit. Searching for my parents' house was a bust, but I was able to find my building, which was built in 1926 and named Scoville Manors. My friend Michele grew up down in southern IL, and her family owned the local funeral parlor. So I also went to her town, and watched the family business move and grow, and that was pretty fun, too. It's clunky as all hell to use, but the information is at least useful and interesting.

Some of the classes in Universal Class are really good - I read through some of the photography text books and learned a lot. One of the recommended texts for the Babysitting 101 class is an American Girl nonfiction book, so this might be a good resource for tweens getting ready to sit on their own.

Kidwise, I think the WorldBook databases are pretty comprehensive and easy to use. Grolier is also great, but currently unavailable remotely. (Eric is working to fix that.)

I've had the Overdrive Console loaded on my work computer since we got the new ones, and I've used it in the past, but now it's only playing mp3 audiobooks and not the wma format. (Sadly for me, the Doctor Who titles are wma.) It probably just needs an update, or maybe Windows Media does, which is only problematic here where I need IT to do all that for me.

I'm not totally sold on the idea of a dedicated eReader for myself, since Stanza on my Touch works so well, but I liked being able to play with the Nooks and Sony. I like how fast the Nook Color moves, but I don't like the screen or needing to swipe to turn the page. The black and white Nook has a similar eInk format that a Kindle has, which is excellent for reading, and has perfectly placed buttons for turning pages, but each page refreshed SO SLOWLY OMG. It took a few seconds, and for part of that, both the old page and new page are overlaid on top of each other. It's a mess. The Sony had similar refreshing issues, although less slow, and the buttons were very awkwardly placed. I'll stick with the iTouch for now.

I was really, really surprised to see how easy it is to download anything from MOD and move it to any of these devices. When I tried it in grad school, it was horribly clunky, but they've really made some good strides. It really was as simple as drag and drop and go. (Okay, that's after you've installed all the software, which is still an annoyance.) Still, I think it'll be worth downloading the Console to my home computer and putting the audiobooks on my iPod, instead of just using the Overdrive app on my iTouch. (Which is super easy to use but, like my work computer, can only load mp3 audios.)