Category: MAGNOLIA

Hold the date! The MegaResource School Librarian Workshop #10 will be held February 19, 2010! The MegaResource School Librarian Workshop is hosted by Mississippi State University Libraries in Starkville, MS and focuses on topics of interest to library media specialists and librarians. We're still working on finalizing the line-up but we hope to have another fun and informative day lined up. More details will follow soon—check back often!

From Stephen Cunetto and the MAGNOLIA Selection Committee:

Over the last couple of years we have heard from many of you that the Grolier online products were not meeting your needs.  As a result of your comments/suggestions, we reviewed a couple of other products to see if they would be a better fit.  This summer the Selection Committee met with Britannica and World Book to see if their products were a better match for the K-12 participants of MAGNOLIA.  After their presentations, the Selection Committee discussed the pros and cons of each product and decided that World Book would be a better fit for our school libraries.  We presented our report to the Steering Committee, who voted unanimously to switch from Grolier Online to World Book effective immediately.

We are in the process of updating the MAGNOLIA website, removing Grolier and adding World Book.  We hope you will be pleased with the switch in products.  This will be for school libraries only.

All other products for all libraries will remain the same for this year.  The URLs are being added/updated on the MAGNOLIA K-12 website at http://library.msstate.edu/magnolia.

Note from Deborah:  I talked with Stephen this morning; remote access/access from home is not yet set up for World Book.  They hope to have this established quickly.    There’s also a Customer Training Site, that has downloadable training materials, scavenger hunts (to introduce students to World Book) and other resources librarians and teachers may find useful:  http://www.worldbook.com/training/

Deborah

Several Library Instructional Services faculty presented sessions at this summer's Mississippi Association for Career and Technical Education (ACTE) conference.  Sessions included MAGNOLIA Business Resources, Health Resources, Copyright, Internet Safety, and Information Literacy in the Workplace.  We've posted the PowerPoint presentations and handouts online (as part of the Magnolia Training Resources page).  If you're interested in these topics, check them out!

Deborah

Credo Reference has added several new and updated titles to the Credo Reference database.  Some of the new titles include:

• 50 Key Concepts  in Gender Studies
• Biographical Dictionary of British Economists
• A Financial History of the United States
• Geography of the World
• Key Concepts in Early Childhood Education and Care
• Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research
• Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature
• Key Contemporary Concepts
• Need to Know? Islam

Credo Reference is available as part of the MAGNOLIA suite of databases.  Be sure to check out this useful collection of online reference resources!

Deborah

Credo Reference has released a new “Librarian How-To Guide”.  The free pdf guide provides tips and strategies for promoting CredoReference titles to your users.  (CredoReference is available through the MAGNOLIA databases.) The guide is available online.

The subject category “Biography” has been added to the K-12 Magnolia database page.  This should help you and your students find biographical material within the MAGNOLIA resources.

April is National Poetry Month and you have lots of resources within Magnolia to help celebrate!  You can also find some helpful resources at Poets.Org, the official website of the Academy of American Poets.  Their Tips for Teachers contains lots of suggestions for using poetry in your classroom or library. 

Be sure to check out the Magnolia Training Guide for more resources!

Don't forget that you can tap into a world of online reference works through CREDO!  Provided as part of the MAGNOLIA databases statewide, Credo Reference brings encyclopedias, handbooks, dictionaries, and hundreds of other sources into your library.  For Women's History Month, check out one of the newer additions to Credo:  Women's History as Scientists: A Guide to the Debates (more info about the book).

Bobby Goff, from our systems department, asked me to post the following information:

As many of you know, over the past several weeks there have been problems accessing Magnolia.  this was caused by a defective upgrade on AT&T’s firewall.  On Friday, Feb. 6, AT&T corrected this issue and added a rule to all user accounts that allowed access to Magnolia.  We have checked several schools and libraries that were havng problems and all seems to be well!  If you are still having problems, there are a couple of steps you can take:

• Have your IT department unblock Magnolia using the delegated admin feature.  Have them add the site to their “white” list.  Instructions are in their operations guide.
• Open a trouble ticket by calling 1-800-317-3343 #2 #5.  AT&T security will unblock the site according to instructions on the trouble ticket.
• If the first two steps do not resolve your problem, please contact Bobby Goff at bgoff@library.msstate.edu.

Deborah Lee
MegaResource Program Coordinator

The Mississippi State University Libraries has updated the MAGNOLIA Training Resources web page.  As you may remember, we've had a web page that archived our MAGNOLIA training materials, PowerPoint slides, and related handouts.  We've updated this page and moved it into our LibGuides web pages.  We're in the process of updating some of the presentations but you'll still find useful tutorial and training links, including the Middle Search Plus tutorial developed by MSU.  Feel free to explore this web page:  http://guides.library.msstate.edu/magnolia.