South Dakota Library Challenge Lesson 6

Lesson 6 was about WorldCat, the catalog where you can find just about any book in any library in the world. I chose to search for "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien. I got 179 results. This was not too surprising since there's been so many different versions of that book over the years. The top result was a more recent illustrated version, held by 934 libraries. When I clicked on the link to the libraries, it listed all the libraries that have it. The top library was the Brookings Public Library. I liked how the details listed everything, such as size and number of pages, and even showed a photo of the front cover. This would be a great way to make sure you have found the exact book you are looking for. The LC call number was PN6727.D586. It also listed the Dewey call number, 741.5. When I clicked on the author link, it showed a list of his other books, such as the Silmarillion, Lord of the Rings, and the Book of Lost Tales. This would be really nice if you found you liked a particular author and wanted to see a comprehensive listing of that author's books. The subject field was kind of odd for this particular book, listing the subjects as "Middle-Earth" and "Hobbits", both of which are unique to Tolkien's books, so when I clicked on that link I got a listing of Tolkien's other books. If I had chosen a different title, perhaps one about a serial killer, I imagine the subject link would have taken me to other books about serial killers.
When I searched the OAIster database for "South Dakota", I got a listing of articles. I chose "Observations on Bats at Badlands National Park". The best thing about this database is it is all full text, so when you click on the link, it gives you the option to download the article. Once downloaded, it can be printed or just read right on the computer. The article I chose was also text searchable....I don't know if they all are, but it is a great feature. It would enable you to find out right away if the article had particular information. For example, if you were only interested in vampire bats, you could type that into the search and see if the article contained anything on that subject. This is a very useful tool for wading through large amounts of information quickly to weed out the irrelevant.