Morristown Central School Library

Some Special Features of Our Library

Mandarin
We have replaced our card catalog with the computer program called Mandarin. We don’t use the term "card catalog" anymore – the correct modern term is OPAC which stands for Online Public Access Catalog. The power of the computer makes our OPAC a much more useful tool than a card catalog could ever be. For example, when a student types a keyword to do a subject search, the computer looks at every word in every subject (not just the first word which is all you could do with a card catalog) and the cross references as well as each and every word in the description for each book in the database. This allows students to find material they could never have located with a simple card catalog.

Mandarin is a multi-layer program which provides a range of search options from simple keyword searches that first and second graders can master right through the most advanced database searching techniques in use today. The first screen gives access to simple subject, title, and author searches. A Browser and Truncation (using a shortened version of a word such as dino* for dinosaur) is available to help when correct spelling is a problem. Truncation also helps students find all the information available with one search. The Enhanced Search adds the use of Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, XOR, <,>) within and between fields (in this case subject, title, author, series, call number). The system also provides Expert Search. This allows searching using indexed fields through neumonics, set searching as well as Truncation and Boolean operators. This wide range of searching options allows us to start teaching search strategies in the younger grades and then develop these skills over the years until our students are well versed in the most advanced searching techniques they will need to be successful in college or business.

Norpac and Hobo
Interlibrary Loan makes it possible for our students in a small rural community to access materials from libraries throughout the North Country. The North Country Reference & Research Resources Council coordinates the production of the computer CD entitled Norpac. Norpac (North Country Online Public Access Catalog) gives us access to the holdings of over 400 North Country libraries from Oswego to Plattsburg. The current Tenth Edition contains over 25,000 periodical titles comprising the North Country Union List of Serials, a book catalog of approximately 662,000 titles and 2,320,000 holdings and the Historical Documents Inventory of archival and manuscript holdings of North Country libraries and repositories.

When students can’t find what they need here in our own library, they may go to Norpac and get the information they need to interlibrary loan the materials. Norpac also has searching options which range from simple subject, title and author searching to sophisticated advanced searching using truncation, Boolean operators and limiting fields. Students print out the complete record for the book they want, and we then send a request to the holding library using the e-mail program called HOBO which is also provided by the 3 R’s Council. If the book is available, most requests are received in about one week.

CCCD
We participate in the St. Lawrence-Lewis School Library System’s Coordinated Cooperative Collection Development Project. For this project, individual libraries build special collections of materials on curriculum related topics that are loaned to other schools as needed for research units. This is a very cost effective program that allows us to pool our resources to provide an extensive collection of high quality materials that enables teachers to enrich particular curriculum units.

We have two Elementary CCCD Units – Folk Tales and the Human Body as well as two High School CCCD Units – The American Civil War and International Cookery. We are adding a new High School CCCD Unit this year on AP English Literature. In the future, we plan to post bibliographies of these materials to this Web Site.

First Search
The North Country 3R’s Council provides our library with OCLC First Search. This is an online service that provides us with the following 12 databases:
  1. Wilson Select Covers more than 430 essential journals. 100% of the abstract and index citations link to ASCII full text.
  2. World Cat An international catalog of over 37 million records. You can search by subject, keyword, phrase, Boolean operators, and more. You’ll find books, serials, sound recording, video-cassettes, musical scores, maps, archives, manuscripts and computer files owned by 25,000 libraries worldwide. Each record includes library locations.
  3. ArticleFirst Contains bibliographic citations that describe items listed on the table of contents pages of more than 13,000 journals in science, technology, medicine, social science, business, the humanities, and popular culture. Each record describes one article, news story, letter or other item.
  4. FastDoc Covers over 900,000 articles from more than 1,000 journals, virtually 100% of which are readily available on line.
  5. Medline Covers all areas of medicine, including clinical medicine, experimental medicine, dentistry, nursing, health services administration, nutrition, and much more. Indexes over 3,500 journals (most with abstracts).
  6. Eric Educational Resources Information Center has represented the most complete bibliography of educational materials available since 1966. The Eric database is a guide to published and unpublished sources on thousands of educational topics, with information from RIE (Resources in Education) and CIJE (Current Index to Journals in Education).
  7. GPO Monthly Catalog Consists of records by the GPO (Government Printing Office) since July 1976. Includes references to congressional committee reports and hearings, debates, documents from executive departments, and more.
  8. PapersFirst Provides access to individual papers presented at conferences worldwide. A major research aid covering every congress, symosium, exposition, workshop, and meeting added to the British Library Document Supply Centre’s vast proceedings collection since October 1993. Users may order the full text papers from the British Library.
  9. ProceedingsFirst Provides tables of contents of papers presented at conferences worldwide. Each record contains a list of the papers presented at each conference. Users may order these from the British Library.
  10. ContentsFirst Contains the table of contents pages and holdings information from more than 13,000 journals in science, technology, medicine, social science, business, the humanities, and popular culture. Most journals are published in English; some journals in other languages are included.
  11. OCLC Union Listing Includes more than 7 million listings linked to over 750,000 bibliographic records in WorldCat. The listings provide local holdings information so that users can search for locations of periodicals in their own and other libraries.
  12. NetFirst Contains bibliographic citations – complete with summary descriptions and subject headings – describing Internet-accessible resources, including World Wide Web pages, interest groups, library catalogs, FTP sites, Internet services, Gopher servers, electronic journals, and newsletters. Records contain location information that can be used to connect users to resources of interest.

Pilot Site for C.E.R.F.
We would like to publicly thank Harry Chan for making us a pilot site for Media Flex Inc.’s new service entitled C.E.R.F. Curriculum & Education Resource Finder is the revolutionary directory of selected, evaluated, and indexed education Web documents. Web keyword searches can find thousands of sites on the World Wide Web. However, teachers and students know that sifting through those huge "hitlists" can be tedious and time-consuming. C.E.R.F. researchers comb the Web, evaluate, index and organize curriculum-oriented sites in a comprehensive database. The C.E.R.F. search interface provides easy access to thousands of resource documents you need.

We will begin using C.E.R.F. in September 1998. Watch here for more complete details as they become available.

Proquest Direct and Electric Library
The St. Lawrence-Lewis School Library System provides us with the online programs Proquest Direct and Electric Library. These are a wonderful resource for our students.

By combining powerful, convenient searching with vast information resources, Proquest Direct delivers relevant answers quickly and effectively. These answers are delivered to your desktop from UMI's continually growing vault of journals, periodicals, dissertations, magazines, newspapers, and other information sources through instant online access and speedy full-text delivery. Proquest Direct includes the following in it's database:
  1. Full text of The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and more publications from Dow Jones
  2. Indexing and abstracts to over 5,000 periodicals
  3. Full-image coverage of nearly 1,400 periodicals and ASCII full text of over 1,000 more
  4. Full-text coverage of The New York Times and over 500 other newspapers
  5. Citations to 1.4 million dissertations

ProQuest Direct is built around a powerful search engine that allows you to search for general concepts, rather than individual words. The full text search can search the entire text and abstracts of all available documents. The design of the search engine is based on decades of research on retrieving relevant answers from large databases. ProQuest Direct's strength comes from its ability to search every word of every document in its vast database for the specific information you seek.

Electric Library is an online library for students. It contains an outstanding collection of K-12 research sources including hundreds of periodicals, such as newspapers, magazines and journals; 28 international and domestic newswires, including Reuters and Gannett; 1,000 maps and 40,000 photographs; NPR and broadcast news transcripts; 2,000 reference books, as well as major works of literature and art.

Students pose a question in plain English to launch a comprehensive and simultaneous search across the massive database that contains the full-text of thousands of articles and images. In seconds, query results are displayed in a colorful, easy-to-read interface, with documents and images ranked in order to relevance to the search question, with titles, authors, and reading levels displayed. Just double click on the document of your choice and select the "Best Part" button that takes students directly to the most significant portion of the document where search terms are highlighted. The materials may be printed out and also can be copied and pasted into a word processing document with bibliographic information automatically transferred.

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The LSTA Project is funded by North Country Reference and Research Resources Council
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