DCCC Library Books and Bytes

Each Fall, the American Library Association awards the best free web sites for reference. The sites can be either academic or general/popular. I will be posting three “best free sites” from 2008 each weekday over the next two weeks. Included will be award-winning sites for students in hotel/restaurant, history, education, humanities, economics, sociology, and allied health, as well as general /popular sites for news, job search, etc.

For starters, take a look at these three hospitality related sites:

www.cookinglight.com

A companion site to the very famous www.myrecipes.com (which now contains over 20,000 recipes), Cooking Lite includes nutrition, travel tips (i.e. healthiest cities and best places to eat), cooking tips and keeping good health.

www.fodors.com

The well-known publisher of paperback Fodor’s guides has produced this free travel site on how to plan a trip to a particular destination and what to do when you get there. Includes forums for chat and advice.

www.tsa.gov/travelers/index.shtm

The Transportation Security Administration Area for Travelers is a site from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for information regarding security related requirements on all types of public transportation in the U.S.  This is one stop shopping for average wait times, baggage  information, etc.

Tomorrow’s winning sites: political science (mag)

Art Stor and JStor are two additional databases that DCCC students can access. Both can be found in the list of databases via the library homepage at http://libdb.dccc.edu/menu

Art Stor provides thousands of images classified into art categories like architecture, fashion, humanities, film, paintings, drawings, maps etc. The database can be searched by geography (i.e.China), location of art (i.e. Phila. Museum of Art) , title of work and type of art.

JStor is an archive of digitized journal articles in the fields of language and literature. ENG 112 students and others will appreciate the number of literary journals included in JStor, to complement the literary criticism available in the Ebsco, Lion and Wilson databases.

Contact a reference librarian at library@dccc.edu for information on these or any of DCCC library databases. (MG)

If you want just the facts about where candidates stand on the issues; and if you want to know if something you heard is fact or rumor, then browse through the following three web sites before you cast your vote in the 2008 elections:

www.votesmart.org

www.opensecrets.org

www.factcheck.org

Librarians Carol Videon and Mary Ann Gillette are considering a venture onto youtube.com or possibly teachertube.com as a way to share tips on good research habits. Enjoy the four vignettes linked below (right click and have your speakers on) which show the do’s and don’ts of beginning research: Note: no Film Directors or Real Actors were harmed (or used) during the making of these tapes…

Inter Library Loan (panic)

Researching the Renaissance (wrong resource)

Global Warming (Backfilling a paper with sources-NO!)

The Print Out (what am I doing and why am I doing it?)

In addition to taking a three credit course called DPR 116: Online Research Strategies, students also have the opportunity to improve internet searching skills by using the three research tutorials featured on the front page of the library homepage at www.dccc.edu/library.  “Search Path” is aimed at general freshman level research while the Nursing Tutorial and the Basic Business Tutorial with Exercise are more specific to their disciplines.

The Basic Business Tutorial with Exercises is not just a list of useful web sites; rather it is designed to help students think about, approach and evaluate the research process so that they can generate their own quality resources in the future. Eleven exercises appear throughout the tutorial. Students who wish to test their searching skills can print out the exercises only and fill in the blanks.