Friday, July 6, 2007

week 9 Thing 22



Part of a book series I collect is online at Project Gutenberg.Betty Wales Sophomore, recently joined by Betty Wales Senior by Margaret Warde. These are books from a series for girls written in the early 1900s set in Harding College, which is a fictional Smith College. Once I saw this on Project Gutenberg, I was convinced I could find a lot of books there and I was right.

It hadn't occurred to me to put some of these books in our library catalog, but I will, thanks to Napa High Books . I have purchased a good number of e-books for our library, mostly reference books. These have been a big hit (which is sort of a pun as they get a lot of hits according to the statistics I track). My favorite vendor platform for the books is Gale's. It is very versatile in regards to printing and emailing, useful search feature, it lets you search more than one book at a time, it links nicely to Gale databases and it has a nice citation generator.

I have used DailyLit which sends a chapter a day of selected classics. I received daily chapters of the Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant until I got tired of just reading a chapter a day and went and checked the book out! But I thought this might be a way to hook reluctant readers. I also use my public library for ebooks and audio books. I just wish Apple and Overdrive would solve the format problems so I could download into my iPod.

I explored LibriVox, and will keep this tool in mind. I subscribe to Audible and have loved listening to books on my commute. I recommend audiobooks to patrons who seem to really like "story". . Also, I have found some students can listen to a classic book much more easily than they can read it. I find this to be true for myself. I recently listened to Madame Bovary and I liked it better than I did when I read it (admittedly a long time ago). I have not yet found a good mechanism for actually checking audiobooks out through the library, though.

4 comments:

Jackie S, 2.0 project manager said...

Want to add your idea about hooking reluctant readers on "chapter a day" books sent to them by e-mail? Add it to the Curriculum Connections wiki at http://calcurriculum.pbwiki.com/Podcasts,+Video+and+Downloadable+Audio

Best wishes.

ElaineMc said...

Just wanted to say that I'm fond of the Betty Wales series (as well as of the college-girl genre in general), and was very glad to see someone else who likes it, too!

Joan Tracy said...

Elainemc,
I couldn't respond back to you as your profile is private. But if you check here again, I'd love to have a conversation about BW and college girl genre series. I collect them, in a desultory fashion.

ElaineMc said...

Joan-- I believe I've fixed that; I primarily use LJ, and just happened to stumble across you here. I'd love to talk about the genre & BW! I own a handful of Nell Speed's Molly Brown series; and have read several the college girl series available online (Jane Allen, Grace Harlowe, BW), as well as "schoolgirl stories" in general (Laura Lee Hope's girls' series, Ruth Fielding, Angela Brazil's boarding school stories, Hildegarde Frey's Campfire Girls books, etc).

I think part of my fascination is that they're so far both from modern experience and expectations, and from some of their predecessors (I'm fond of the Elsie Dinsmore stories, although that's sort of a morbid fascination).