>> Good afternoon everyone.
My name is Kathy McGuigan from the Library
of Congress and I'd like to welcome you
to today's Professional Development
Educator Webinar.
Today's topic is Finding Resources on loc.gov.
So some housekeeping items
before we get started.
We are recording this program and we will
serve the recording as soon as we are able.
As this event will be recorded, any questions
or other participant contributions
may be publicly available
as part of the Library's archives.
Participants in the live program
are eligible for a certificate
of participation certifying one hour.
More on that at the end of the program.
You'll have the opportunity to talk to
each other and to the presenters via chat
and I see a few of you have
already gotten started.
So I'm going to encourage everybody else
to step up and get started using chat.
While I'm introducing today's program,
you can use chat to tell us your name,
where you're joining us from,
and why you came here today.
Please make sure -- Excuse me.
Hold on one second.
Please make sure that you select the two box
in the dropdown box, select all participants.
Sorry, I can't do two things at once.
Alright, so now on to today's program.
Foundations: Findings Resources on loc.gov.
The Library of Congress website offers millions
of digitized primary sources free to use
with your students along with
many free teacher resources.
In a second we'll share tips for finding
resources in the library's vast collection
by navigating loc.gov and effectively
using the library's search engine.
So be prepared to have your questions answered
and let us help you find what you need.
Our speakers today are all educational resource
specialists at the Library of Congress.
We have with us today Danna Bell,
Cheryl Lederle, and Stacie Moats.
I'm pleased now to turn the mike
over to our first speaker, Cheryl.
>> Thank you Kathy and thanks
to all the participants.
I'm delighted to see the lively chat already.
It bodes well for a lively
interaction for the coming hour.
So here are our goals.
Together, we will first tour shortcuts
to finding primary sources on loc.gov,
what of the quick ways and
then we'll explore techniques
for constructing original searches on loc.gov.
And to break this up, we've
divvied this up into three parts
because we're doing a lot more
demo than we would typically do.
We've made some interactive pieces but it's
not quite as interactive as our usual show.
The first thing I have to explain is why
there's now an elephant on your screen.
When Danna and Stacie and I were planning this,
we just started tossing around primary sources
because there are so many of
them and they're so interesting.
We like to joke that there's a
primary source for every purpose
and so we picked one for Danna first.
You'll see it later.
And then went back in and Stacie and I each
picked one and I went with the elephant
because I'm showing you the shortcuts.
And in my mind, this elephant reminded me of the
story of the five blind men and the elephant.
It's huge and yet nobody sees the
whole of it and so it's really helpful
to share your discoveries to get through it.
And that's a quick picture of me
in my work-from-home environment.
We keep our cameras off because we
often have some bandwidth problems
and let's hope that doesn't happen to us today.
So this is a version of the library's
home page and I put it that way
because you can see the arrows
to the left and right.
Not only do the pages scroll, highlight
different programs and activities at the Library
but because it's a website,
it also changes frequently.
So this is your starting place
here at the library's homepage.
If you scroll to the very bottom of the
homepage, you'll find and I will pause
at a couple of intervals and
direct you to parts of the website.
So I would encourage you right now to just
listen and follow along with your eyes
and then we'll get you on the website.
At the bottom of the library's
homepage is a set of resources.
Sorry, I was reading a note from somebody.
Thanks Elizabeth.
Yes, I know that the images
do arrive on screen quite late
and I hadn't realized the lag
time was quite that severe today.
You'll find free to use and reuse sets .
The current set is on weddings and in fact
our colleague Danna who will be joining this,
will be presenting in a little
bit actually compiled this set
which is really fun to see her thinking on that.
If you want to see more than just weddings, the
orange circle now is around the link that says
"browse more content that
is free to use and reuse"
and let me just emphasize
these materials are selected
with an eye toward they are free
of any copyright entanglement.
So you can use them in your teaching.
You can put them on T-shirts, whatever you like.
Here's a selection of the sets available.
You can get a sense that they range from pretty
serious to the really quite perfectly frivolous.
My personal favorite probably is slightly to
the left and toward the bottom of the screen,
the sort of gold box that says "Edward
Penfield His Book" is in a set on cats.
The Internet loved us that month.
But even the set that seems frivolous, like free
to use and reuse ice cream, I look at that image
and I see a lot of lesson
possibility in the image that's there.
Yvonne, thank you for your question.
Are all images on loc.gov in the public domain?
No, they're not which is why
these sets are really wonderful.
I would say the majority of
them are but you really want
to do your rights assessment before you
do anything beyond the bounds of fair use.
And that would be a whole different webinar
so we're not going to of too far into that.
I would encourage you to continue
put your questions in the chat box.
I may or may not stop.
Yvonne's was pretty quick and easy to
respond to, so that made sense to me.
But some of them, we might pick up later
but please do enter your questions.
So now what I'd like you to do, Stacie is going
to put a link in the chat box to the free to use
and reuse set or you can just go to loc.gov
and scroll to the bottom of the page.
But I would like you to take just a minute to
explore those and then share in the chat box.
Kathy, I'm not seeing all
participants in my choice and I wonder
if Stacie is seeing that as a choice.
Could you double check your magic.
Oh, now I see it.
Direct your conversations to all
participants about your discoveries.
Stacie, if you're there and can put the
link in the chat, that would be great.
>> Cheryl, my apology.
It's not coming up for me.
I only have all attendees.
>> Okay, Danna, can you jump
in while Stacie sorts it out?
Mike, thank you.
>> I've been putting this in.
>> This is why we're redundantly staffed.
So there is a chat -- There
is a link in the chat.
And take a minute to explore the set.
And if you see a set that you
might use in your teaching,
it would be great if you would put the link
to that set in the chat and then maybe a word
or two about how you'd use it because
for me, the sharing of what would I do
with it is always the most
important part of the sharing.
So I'm going to actually go silent
for about a minute and invite you
to go ahead and explore for just a minute.
>> And thank you Ian [assumed spelling]
for kicking us off with the link
to the World War One posters and a note
that you would use them for a gallery walk.
I notice Laura has put in
discovery and exploration.
Love to know what you would do with it.
Tamera or Tamora, I apologize for not
knowing how to pronounce your name,
notes that Black woman organizers
would be powerful for right now.
Billy Kotterman [assumed spelling] has found a
picture and says this is perfect for my class
on depiction of African-Americans
during and after the Civil War.
And Kathy has entered a reminder to
select all participants when responding
or asking questions please and she'll collect
the questions and serve them back to us
for a Q&A following the presentation.
Angela likes the cat set and
might use them in a compare
and contrast discussion with the dog set.
That's putting in two.
I'm going to invite you as
soon as it is comfortable
to drift on back over to the webinar.
Leave that tab open if you'd like.
I encourage you to leave things
so you can find them again.
But draw your attention back here.
And in just about ten seconds
I'm going to keep on moving.
I love this lively conversation.
Some really good ideas.
Also, don't feel like if you
can't keep up with the chat
because it's moving fast,
don't feel like you have to.
We will save this and it'll be
available to you after this event.
So back to the library's homepage as
an anchor point for more shortcuts.
If you look to the bottom of the page, you'll
see the orange box is around digital collection.
And Stacie has put the link to loc.gov in
the chat if you're wanting to follow along.
I want to just pop into the
digital collections page briefly.
Danna will likely get to this later.
The orange circle now is around one
of my personal favorite collections.
This is a little like a favorite child,
though, right, how can you choose.
This is chronicling America, historic
American newspapers collection
and there are some shortcuts to this to
searching these more than 16 million pages, yes,
that's correct, 16 million pages.
And again Danna will likely get into the
searching for that a little bit later
in her part of the presentation
when she goes a little deeper
in constructing a search originally
but I'm going with the shortcuts.
And I direct your attention to the
left column where the orange circle is
or will quickly appear around
recommended topics.
The folks who work with these
newspapers compile these topics to some
of the most popular topics and
I want to just follow along.
It's okay.
You don't have to follow step by step.
Just watch where I am now and
we'll make sure you get caught up.
I'm going in by subject.
Oh, I don't know why this is taking off.
Topics by subject and I want to take a look
at one in art education, culture crazes
and trends just because it strikes
me as having some fun possibilities.
And this is what you might find.
I picked a simple one that
again I thought was fun
but you could certainly go
with much more serious topics.
The topics range from things that
you're definitely teaching to things
that you probably haven't
thought about that you might want
to later and I picked the Ouija board.
They also have the same general pattern
of an introduction telling you what
it was and then below that a timeline.
And it goes on quite a bit farther but
for the purposes of getting a screen tap,
we just have the top part of the timeline.
And then you can see up in the left where
the orange box is, there's a tab to go
to search strategies and
selected articles as well.
And this is probably for my money the most
valuable part of this, of these topics pages
because they tell you how
to get into the collection.
They tell you how to think
historically about the topic.
And again Danna will go deeper
into thinking historically
when you're searching the library's collections.
But for example Ouija board, sure,
talking board, okay I can see that
but I wouldn't have thought of it.
[inaudible], I have to go look up that word.
I really don't know what it is.
So lots of search terms that
will find you more like this.
And then selected articles, is
it really just some, not all,
and I guarantee if you ran the searches,
you could find this many and more.
If you have really struggling
research [inaudible],
this might be the basis for their research.
They can read these and they can draw their
conclusions and collect their evidence for it.
So back to the topics by subject page and
I'm going to ask Stacie to put that link
in one more time and ask you once more to take
just a minute, just a minute to explore any
of the topics and share your discoveries
and see that you are have continued
in the chat sharing some possibilities.
So take just about one minute
to go to topics by subject.
Gretchen, I'm going to answer your question
because the answer is I don't actually
know because I've never done it.
I suspect that the articles are selected
because they cover a range of geography
and perspectives on the topic but I don't know.
As I say, I haven't done it.
Again, Stacie has put topics by
subject in the chat box for you.
Take just a minute to explore
and share what you find.
Yes, Gretchen, what goes into these
topics guides are hand selected.
The search, of course, the search
results themselves are randomized.
It's a keyword search and they just come up.
Thank you.
Lauren likes a variety of different topics
under the struggle for human rights and freedom.
Angela points out that Houdini
guide, loves magic.
Mike Appledorf [assumed spelling] points
out this is timely America Spanish flu.
Gary points out Carnegie libraries in the US.
Karen, no idea.
It's information that could
be found but I don't know.
And Robert also is tuned into
the Spanish flu topic guide.
If that's of interest, we've
done a bit around that topic.
Bernard asked how often topics are added.
It's a little bit as staff
has time to put them together.
There are obviously probably literally
infinite number of possibilities.
So it's a little bit of -- Lisa says
requested item could not be found
when requesting more here from Houdini.
I'm not sure if you want to
save that for the Q&A, Lisa.
We'll dig into it.
Karen, bicycle fashion, who knew.
That's a fascinating topic because bicycles
actually changed women's fashion mores in ways
that I had no idea until I
started poking around in this.
I'm glad that you found some
successes and I appreciate the sharing.
Now I would like to introduce
to you my colleague Stacie.
This is the image that she picked, the
dog bark park and here's her explanation.
She said this is perfect because
these are Stacie's personal dogs,
so you can see the connection
between the dog bark park
and here Stacie with her new puppy Chloe.
So I'm going to say thank you for your
energy, thank you for your attention.
I'm going to meet myself and turn this over to
Stacie who's going to take you through to one
of our faithful companions, the teachers' page.
>> Great. Thanks so much Cheryl and thank
you all for being here today with us.
We really appreciate you spending your time
and hope you find a lot to
help you in your teaching.
So we turn now to the Library
of Congress homepage
and we're right underneath the main image.
And if you're looking in real-time on
your own page, it might be different.
But you'll see beneath their Cheryl
has highlighted for me teachers
and that is your direct link
to get to the teachers' page.
So Cheryl, if you click on through, the
teachers' page is really like your one stop shop
for everything teacher focused, free,
ready-to-use materials for teaching
with the library's digitized primary sources.
And if I can point you to a particular
our professional development offerings
for this summer that are ongoing.
I know you've already found your way here, the
one on the right the free educator webinars;
however, you might not know
that it's a recurring series
and so the next session next
Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern is going
to be focused pairing primary
sources and picture books
and I hope you'll take a look
at other upcoming offerings.
To the left of that you'll
see our online office hours.
I'm sorry, if we could just go back to
the online office hours for education
in these are every Tuesday also
at 2:00 o'clock Eastern time.
And these are little more informal and they
provide more opportunity to engage in Q&A
with library experts as well
as with your teacher colleagues
on various topics from the library's website.
And I think the one next
week is going to be focused
on 20th century political
cartoons at the library.
So a lot of great information
that you can get that way.
If you continue on though, I'd
like to share another resource
that I find particularly useful.
This is our teaching with
the Library of Congress blog.
And if you are familiar with it, we
just hit our big milestone, 1000 posts,
which to me is incredible because I remember
when we first started and even ten seemed
like a lot, not only colleagues from our
learning innovation office team but also
from across the library and
partners contribute to this blog.
And if you go on through Cheryl, you'll see that
you can look at it not only chronologically,
we've actually gone here to the second page
because you can go backwards
in time at different posts.
You can also take a look there on the left,
you'll see at the top you can
search the blog by key word.
So for instance, if you were to look on
engineering for instance, you could find,
I think the last time I looked
more than 40 posts tied
to engineering and STEM-related activities.
You also can look by name.
So for instance, Jason Reynolds, our National
Ambassador For Young People's Literature,
several posts relating to
[inaudible] newsletters.
So lots of ways to search this blog.
And again, just great teacher-focused material
on all kinds of topics, as you can see their.
Copyright, Hispanic American heritage,
United States history, you name it
and there's probably something for you here.
So moving back to the teachers' page again,
I want to point to the classroom materials
because this section for me is really just I
think extremely valuable especially when you get
into my favorite resource,
the primary source set.
And again, you can see we have other things
like lesson plans and collection connections
but for me the primary source sets, if you just
use one, these are the ready-to-use materials
that you want for your classroom or
for the online learning environment.
So primary source sets homepage here, you
can see we've got about three dozen now.
I think we've got 36 at last count and they
cover just a variety of topics and connecting
to everything from English language arts
to geography, civics, you know, government,
you name it, I'm sure you
can find a connection here.
Just looking at this page, you can see Alexander
Hamilton, baseball, children's lives at the turn
of the 20th century, a lot
of really great things.
And Cheryl, if you'll go into the dust
bowl primary source set as an example
on the next page, you'll see that each
of these is carefully curated for you.
So the work has been done for
you and that's just so valuable.
At the top there, there's a dust
bowl teachers guide and each
of the primary source sets have this.
And it provides you as the teacher
with historical context for the topic,
teaching suggestions as well as online
resources from the library and elsewhere.
And Cheryl has also highlighted, that
I'm going to take a second before going
to it, the analysis tool and guide.
Below that you'll see just as this
example the dust bowl different thumbnails
of the primary sources in the set.
And again, our team has gone through the
millions of digitized primary sources
in the library's website and found
for you ones that you can use
without worrying about copyright.
And you can go in here and find for example
on this one a map, pictures, manuscripts,
some of them depending on the topic.
You can find motion pictures,
audio recordings all related
to the topic of the primary source set.
My favorite thing about this also is
that when you click on that view PDF,
it's going to give you a ready-to-print PDF
version of the item and you can also save that.
And again, it's going to save you time
not having to go into the collection
and actually format that yourself.
Cheryl, if you go to the next slide.
Here are the teachers' guides and analysis tool.
And again, this is really the
heart of what we do of course
with primary sources is helping students
with their critical thinking, their inquiry
and using this tool, you can help your
students document the process as they go
through observing, reflecting, questioning.
So we have both an online version of the
form that is fillable online, which is great,
especially now, and a PDF version that is also
fillable that could be printed out from there.
We also have, as you can see,
a lot of teachers' guides.
One right there below where it says
teachers' guides analyzing primary sources.
This is a general guide that will
help you facilitate the process
for any primary source although
we also have, as you can see,
many others that are specifically targeting
different formats of primary sources.
So everything from motion pictures to how to
help students look critically at sheet music,
newspapers, political cartoons are all there.
Under guiding questions I just saw Lisa posted
that this is a really great
tool and I agree with that.
I think for anybody who can just come
right in and use this and feel confident
in helping your students with that inquiry.
So moving forward, Cheryl.
I'd like to go back actually to the page
where we have those 36 primary source sets
and invite you all, as Cheryl did, to take
a moment now to just go ahead and explore.
And I believe we'll be posting that
link if it's not already there yet.
Yes, there it is.
And if you all want to take a
minute to explore and post to that.
Yvonne has posted a question about
can you make a request for a set.
Yvonne, that's a great question.
I would suggest you go ahead and send your
recommendation to our ask a librarian,
which I will get to in just a moment.
But yes, we love to hear feedback
from teachers all the time.
And these are based on a lot of
teacher feedback over the years
and hopefully are useful to
a broad range of teachers.
But I see here Margaret has explored
and discovered veterans stories
that look really good.
Thank you Margaret.
Great info on the Wright brothers.
The question about the forms
being different from there.
I would say yes.
The analysis tool itself is really a very
basic tool for documenting students' thinking.
The facilitation guides, those teacher's guides,
really provide just great jumping off points
for facilitating that conversation.
So take a look and I hope you'll use it.
Seeing primary source sets
from different states.
Oh, somebody has noticed the one that
I love, the Industrial Revolution,
[inaudible] Paterson, New Jersey.
I myself am from New Jersey.
So yay. And again, we can take
questions at the end here.
Japanese internment sets, women's suffrage.
This is great.
So as Cheryl said earlier, I encourage
you to continue with your search.
Feel free to keep that window open or return
to it later but we are going to move on now
in the interest of time because I want to make
sure that my colleague Danna has plenty of time
for her think aloud that
she's going to be doing.
So back now to the library's homepage.
And if you click on the top right
drop-down menu, you're going to see
about halfway down ask a librarian.
And this is actually available from a lot
of pages on the library site but I wanted
to show you how to get to it from
the homepage so you don't forget
because if you do nothing else
today, I hope you will remember
that the primary source sets are there for
you and that this online service is available
for you and for anyone, anywhere in the world.
You can use this form to submit a research
question or to ask for more information.
And one of our reference staff
will be routed to the right area
if you don't know where it should go.
Otherwise, you can specify say for instance
the teachers' page and they get back to you
with just incredible information
and a lot of help.
And again, I can't say enough, I really
think one of our greatest treasures
at the library are the staff experts in
our reference staff are second to none
in just the fact that anyone
can use this is just fantastic.
So please do especially as teachers, we
hope you will take advantage of that.
And along those lines, I want to now share
this really interesting illustration.
As Cheryl said, this led us all down
kind of a fun path when we were talking
about our colleague Danna Bell as a wizard.
And this is an illustration from a First Edition
of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and that's part
of the library's historical children's books.
And there is our colleague Danna
Bell who is a wizard truly.
She is the person who if you do send a question
that gets routed through the ask a librarian
to the teachers' page in our LIO
team, learning innovation team,
Danna is the one who will respond to you.
And Danna, as Cheryl said earlier, someone
who also creates a ton of resources including
that free to use and reuse weddings set and
just does an incredible amount of work for us.
So before I turn things over to Danna Bell,
I'm just showing you how amazing she is.
She agreed very gamely to let Cheryl and I pick
a topic for her and she is in real time going
to do a think aloud for you on the topic.
And so Danna, without further ado
I'm going to give you your topic
which is the transcontinental railroad.
So thank you Danna and we can't
wait to hear what you have to share.
>> Hello. I'm really excited to work with you
guys and hopefully in a second I'll be able
to share my screen as I go through this process.
I receive a number of questions
regularly from -- There we go.
Alright. I want --
Hang on one second.
Alright. There we go.
Sorry, sometimes technology and I are not
good friends and this is one of those moments.
>> Danna, this is Kathy.
Do you want to go up and select share.
Okay.
>> Can you see that I've shared now
or are you still seeing other things?
>> No, I see a black screen.
If you would go to share and select
application into your web browser.
>> Okay.
>> Or just go directly to web browser.
There you go.
Thank you.
>> Alright.
Cool. So you're now seeing the library's
homepage and the ask a librarian.
And I'll point out very quickly if you want to
get to me, you go here to teacher resources.
So I'm going to go back up
to the library's homepage.
And if someone asked me questions about the
transcontinental railroad, I would take a moment
and I would think about terms
that I might use such as
"transcontinental railroad" would be an
obvious one, "Golden Spike" or "spike,
westward expansion, trains"
and so on down the line.
So a lot of times what I do when I'm
searching is I do the lazy bear search
and put in transcontinental.
And you'll notice the pull down screen gives
the transcontinental railroad as an option.
So I'm going to do a quick search.
And you'll notice if you look over here,
there are 20,000 items, 20,000 plus items.
There is no way that I would go through
20,000 items to answer a reference question.
It would simply take too long and we get too
many questions and other things to do that.
So what I would do is very quickly
either go through the first dozen or so
or if I'm not seeing anything that's exciting,
I would probably use the left navigation.
And I'll show you the left
navigation in a second.
But what I wanted to do is note that when
I went to see, when I did the search,
I noticed the first thing is the Golden
Spike topics in chronicling America,
which talks about the joining
of the Golden Spike.
The next thing is today in history.
And today in history is an amazing
source that's done by my colleagues
in the research and reference division.
And what they do is they give
you a little bit of background,
link to some images and other resources,
some maps.
And then at the bottom of the
page there is a learn more.
So this gives you other resources that you might
use to look for the transcontinental railroad.
So I'm noticing as I go through,
there some really good resources
on the transcontinental railroad,
some images and so on.
But what if I wanted to narrow down some more,
I didn't want to go through 20,000 items?
You'll notice the left navigation over
here and this allows you to choose
by the original format, for example if
you're looking for a specific manuscript,
if you want photographs, you can limit by
that particular item or particular format.
If you're looking for a specific date and in
this case we would be looking for the 1800
to 1899 unless we're looking for the impact,
for example, of the transcontinental railroad
and then we might go into 1900 to 1999.
And again, that's another
way to limit your search.
And the last thing I'll point out is subjects
and you can limit by specific subject.
And if you don't see your subject listed
here, click on more subjects and that gets you
into a list of subjects where the
transcontinental railroad is mentioned.
One thing you'll note is that
they have it by number of matches.
I always changed alphabetical
because going through n ordered list
like this would make me slightly crazy.
One other thing that I'll point out
when I'm doing searches is I look
down here for the access condition.
Someone asked earlier if everything
on the Library of Congress website is
in the public domain and
Cheryl answered that for you.
If you find something that's
not in the public domain,
you'll only be able to see
a teeny tiny thumbnail.
So I always click on available
online and that gets me things
that I know that are in the public domain.
So let's limit our search
to things from 1800 to 1899.
And I want to choose a specific item.
And I will tell you we're
getting a lot of things
from the railroad map, which
are really amazing map.
But I'm going to click on this particular map.
And I'm going to scroll down and look at the
bibliographic record for this particular map.
And this is another way that if I'm getting
stuck, if I find something that really,
really works, I will go into the bibliographic
record and look and see what terms are used.
I might be able to use the contributor
name or I might be able to go
into a specific collection
such as the railroad map.
And you notice over here, the
subject headings are hot linked.
And maybe railroad land grants
will lead me into other maps
and other resources that would be beneficial.
Does [inaudible] have citation
links for students?
Yes, they do.
What I'm going to do is I've clicked back
a couple of screens and I'm going to click
on this one that says "Central
Pacific transcontinental railroad"
and I'm going to scroll down and this is
from a collection called historic
American buildings survey,
engineering survey, landscape survey.
And you can only do this for individual items.
You can't do it for the whole
thing or a whole list of things
but you'll notice you have the
rights advisory to let you know
that this particular item
is made by the US government
which means it's in the public domain.
And then you'll see this box
that says "cite this item"
and you're given the citation
for Chicago, APA and MLA.
And also if you scroll down
to the bottom of the page,
you'll get more photos, prints
and drawings like this.
And the one other question I did see very, very
quickly was can you choose by multiple formats.
And you're about to make a reference
librarian very sad because the answer is no.
You can only go through one of these at a time.
That said, if I were looking for newspapers
instead of going into this right here,
though there are some benefits here, I
would go into chronicling America first
and what I'm doing is I'm going
to sneak into chronicling America
through the Golden Spike research guide.
I think I am anyway.
I think I'm going to cheat and go
back to the Library's homepage.
And to digital collections
And to chronicling America.
The things to remember, excuse me, about
chronicling America is you can limit
if you only want information
for a specific state,
you can limit to say you only wanted things
about the transcontinental railroad from Utah.
You can limit to just newspapers in Utah.
If you don't want to look through every
article that mentions railroad from 1789
to 1963, you can limit to say 1866,
say to 1891, your choice.
Now one thing to think about when
you're doing your searches is remember
that these are materials that were
created at the time the event took place.
So terms that we use now like "transcontinental
railroad" may not have been the words
that were used at the time.
And you want to think carefully
about the terms that you use.
Whoops, sorry.
I've got a conference call in 15 minutes.
So you just saw me being reminded about it.
So choose -- If you're not finding
materials and you're using one term,
be prepared to use a number of different terms.
As I said earlier, go through
the subject headings.
There may be terms that you want to use.
If you do a search and you find too many,
go to the advanced search that's
here and limit again your date range.
And then you could say you only want things
with all the words "transcontinental railroad"
with the phrase "transcontinental
railroad" or with the phrase
"transcontinental railroad"
within five words of each other.
So there are lots of ways to play
around to make your search workable.
But if you're stuck, last thing I'll say
and then I'll turn it over for questions,
please don't forget that there
is an ask a librarian service
that you can use to get questions.
And as I said, you can get me through
teacher resources but all my colleagues
in the other reading rooms are
phenomenal and we are bound to get --
We try to get you a response, not an answer
because sometimes the answers take a little long
than five business days, but
we try to get you a response
to let you know we've gotten your question, we
may have a little bit of information but we need
to go a little bit deeper for
you within five business days.
I can tell you that I try to
answer questions pretty quickly
but if you send me an [inaudible]
question like something on calendar plates,
it might take me a little longer.
Don't ask.
I won't tell.
And I'll leave there and
turn back to my colleagues.
>> Thank you Danna.
That was amazing.
This is Cheryl and while we were listening,
Stacie and I were exchanging notes behind the
scenes trying to map your thinking process a bit
and it's been really fun monitoring
the chat and seeing people
on this call tuning into your thinking.
So let me get some of the highlights.
And Stacie, listen for what I
might have forgotten or missed
because we had a lot going
on in our conversation.
So one of the first things Danna did was
stop and think about her search term.
And she started with the obvious one
and then listed other possibilities.
And she came back to that later when she
got into chronicling when Danna reminded us
that historical materials use language
other than what we might commonly use.
And if we've won you out and you've forgotten
everything else, remember primary source sets,
ask a librarian, and think historically
when you're searching the collections.
When she got the long results, more than 20,000,
what she did was a quick search and scan.
She was looking for shortcuts similar to the
sorts of things we looked at and she zeroed
in on chronicling topics which
you explored extensively,
so I don't need to say more about that.
And also today in history which is the
summary of an event and the learn more.
So that's a real goldmine if you find it.
The other process Danna used
for narrowing her search was
to use the left nav, to choose by format.
If you know your students, somebody in the
chat was talking about looking for a map.
If you know you're looking for a map,
that's a great way to narrow your search.
You might be looking for an item from a
particular time or you know an event happened
at a particular time, so narrowing
by time also is good by date.
Danna also scrolled down to the very
bottom to get to access condition
and she clicked available online to
make sure she could get full access
to everything she was looking for.
Danna, I'm going to pause for
a second and invite you back.
We had a question for you and that was
you said I'm going to choose this map
and you opened the transcontinental route
of the Atlantic and Pacific railroads.
Could you say a little bit more about
your thinking process for choosing
that map out of the whole long list?
>> You're going to laugh
but I just kind of chose it,
the title kind of looked intriguing
and I chose it out of midair.
There are times where I don't
necessarily choose --
There are times when I choose something
because I know it's the right thing.
There are times that I choose something
because I just need something
that's going to pull me forward.
And in this particular case, I saw that
map and went oh, okay, that might help me
through this process and
picked it and went from there.
So nothing magical there.
It's just --
>> Well, it worked really well.
And Danna, brace yourself for more questions.
Get your browser back up
because you're going to need it.
Just a few more thoughts on what we notice
in your thinking and search process again
on the topic of coming up with search terms
because of course that's the biggest part
of searching, right, and effectively and
that is to mine that item record for terms
because again, those are controlled
vocabularies, to use library speak.
They're catalogue terms not
necessarily natural language terms.
And so if you're looking for buckets of
similar items, that's really helpful.
And Danna, the last question I had for you and
then we'll jump off to the questions that are
in the chat -- Michelle, I'm going to interrupt
myself because I see Michelle has to jump off
and wants to know how to register
for next Wednesday's webinar
and Mike has put that in there.
Thank you.
Danna, my question was, can you say more
about your thinking when you're deciding
between searching and chronicling
America and searching for the newspapers
that turn up in a search of loc.gov.
And that's my last question.
So I'm going to say again thank
you to everybody and mute myself.
Kathy has been collecting the
questions in the chat as we go.
>> Chronicling America is not searchable
through the library's main page
which is frustrating to me.
Supposedly that is going to
change within the next year or so.
And I'm sure that the library will
let everybody know when that happens.
One of the reasons I don't choose
newspapers and periodicals is
because in most cases there
are thousands of them.
But what I will do is if I'm scrolling through
and I see that something matches three pages,
for example this is the "The Washington
Times" from November 20, 1911,
which would be interesting, and
I'm just going to click on it.
Whoops, sorry.
Something's at my window and I have
a dog that is not happy about life.
Choppy, shh.
Sorry.
You'll notice that below -- Hang on a second.
Choppy, settle.
Sorry. My security officer is in rare
form at the moment, at a very bad time.
But you'll notice the phrase "transcontinental
railroad" is highlighted in red
and then you can go into the newspaper page.
So I tend to focus on anything where it
gives me a number of pages if I'm going to go
into the newspapers and that saves
me a little bit of time and energy.
But again, this is another time where I
would probably use the left navigation
and limit myself to 1850 to 1899 and then
probably limit myself further to 1865 to 1869.
And then I probably would
change from relevant to date.
And that way I would be getting articles
that were much closer to the
time of the Golden Stake.
So I -- The newspapers that are
online especially if you're looking
for Japanese American Internment, there are
a ton of newspapers from the internment camps
that have been made available online and
I encourage you to take a peek on that
because that is an amazing
collection of resources and --
>> Thank you Danna.
We actually have a number of
questions that we need to get to.
So yes, I'm going to go ahead and ask you,
I'm going to do it specifically to you,
Cheryl or Stacie, depending
on what you guys covered.
And Danna, I'd like you to keep your web browser
up, please, because sometimes we're going
to need that to get to the answer.
Very early in the program Elizabeth asked,
does the Library of Congress staff
conduct due diligence regarding copyright?
I'm actually going to take that question and
explain that all of the resources that are
on the teachers' page are no
known copyright restrictions.
There are resources available
at loc.gov on copyrights
and in our professional development
section under videos.
There is a short video that talks about the
thinking process US educators should be going
through and examining copyright restrictions.
So we'll make sure that we get that URL.
So if you go to loc.gov/teachers,
professional development
and in videos, you should be able to get there.
Is Danna still on?
>> I am still on.
>> Okay, can you actually
show them where that is?
Go to loc.gov/teachers.
>> Okay, hang on one second.
I'm sharing my screen but it -- There we go.
>> It's up.
Yes.
>> Okay.
>> Teachers.
>> Yes. Hang on.
>> And as she's bringing that
up, Brianna asked a question.
Is there a Facebook page or
something for teachers to collaborate
and discuss how these resources are used?
There is not an official Facebook page.
If there is one out there or if you
want to create one, that would be great.
We do have a network called Teaching with
Primary Sources Network and I'm going
to ask Mike to serve up the
URL for the TPS network.
This is a site hosted by one of our Teaching
with Primary Sources Consortium partners
and there are plenty of educators,
10,000 educators,
that are on that site sharing resources,
you know, around their educational plans.
Lisa Kay [assumed spelling]
had a question about she got a
"requested item could not be found" message when
clicking more here from Houdini and newspapers.
So Danna, could you address
why that may have happened?
>> Why she might have -- Hang on.
Dogs are leaving.
That's right.
It's possible that the link
might've been broken for a second.
So this was -- Welcome to
the [inaudible] of my life.
My apologies, ladies and gentleman.
So this is the recommended topics.
It may have been -- It may
have been a tiny hiccup
and it may have been that something is down.
I will tell you they're in the process of
changing over all of these to a new format
and you saw a portion of the new format today.
So there it is.
>> Okay, that's great.
And little inside scoop there around Houdini.
There is another project that called By
the People through the Library of Congress
and the next six months there
will be papers related to Houdini
that will be released through that site.
So stay tuned for more updates on
some resources related to Houdini.
There was a question.
Yvonne actually had two questions.
She asked about the primary
source sets and asked
about making a request for a set of materials.
And Stacie pointed out the ask a
Librarian and the teacher resources.
So if you have some ideas, we suggest that
you put those into that particular form.
But Cheryl, specifically she
had another question which is,
can you describe the process you used
to decide what sets the team creates.
I'm wondering if you could address that, please.
>> Happy to.
Not that it's exactly a clear process.
Yvonne, it's select from the topic that go
into those sets is typically taking a hard look
at what we hear from teachers about
what their needs are and then looking
at the library's collections to see
what the collections will support.
And then the other reality
is just there's, you know,
there are only so many hours in a workweek.
So we're pretty selective about
how fast we can turn those out.
But really we do listen carefully.
As Stacie said, we love input
and we factor all of that in.
>> I'll throw in one other thing.
Occasionally I'll give you the example
of the NAACP primary source set.
There was a huge exhibit that was celebrating
the centennial of the NAACP and we were asked
to create a primary source
set to supplement that.
And so sometimes the library -- In
addition to listening to teachers,
alas we also have to listen to our bosses and if
the boss says you will do a primary source set,
sadly, the boss sometimes is right
and we got to do a primary source set.
So it depends but we really do try very
hard to support our teacher audience.
Kathy, are there other questions?
>> Sorry. I didn't unmute my mike.
I was just explaining that Angela sent
a note in earlier talking about the maps
from the World Digital Library and has served
up the URL for World Digital Library for those
who are interested in those resources.
Along those same lines, Eleanor commented
on the primary source set for veterans
and there were several comments
about the veterans related resources
and through the Veterans History
Project and I'm just going to serve
up that URL as well so that you have it.
I know we're three minutes past the hour
and people have to get going but I do want
to make sure that you do give us
your feedback on the SurveyMonkey
that if you want the certificate,
it is not an automated process.
I need you to send me your first
name and last name in an email
and we'll get those out to you within the week.
And then I wanted to get to the last question.
No, I have two more questions.
Eleanor asks regarding terms, is there a
thesaurus type reference for that sort of thing.
And I believe she was asking
that as you were going through
and looking at transcontinental railroad.
I think that you answered some
of that and I'm going to drop
down to the very last question
that I have on this list.
Heather asked about an online
chat for ask a librarian.
And I'm hopeful that you can bring that up.
>> Okay, I can do -- I'll answer one
question -- I'll answer both questions.
Yes, there are thesauri but there are so
many thesauri that I can't point you to one.
And there are thesauri that our cataloguers use
when they're cataloging,
when they're doing analysis.
So be aware it's there but I wouldn't put
you through the pain of working through it.
In terms of ask a librarian, there are two
areas that do chat: digital collections,
which is the research and reference services
division, and the newspaper current periodicals.
Right now I believe they both
do chat from either 2:00 to 3:00
or 2:00 to 4:00 Monday through
Friday Eastern time.
If they can't answer a question
immediately during chat,
they will ask you to let them
refer it to the email reference
and they'll respond to you as soon as they can.
I know that there are plans afoot to extend
the chat hours but they probably won't start
until I'm assuming July or
August when we're going
to change the ask a librarian form a little
bit to make it a little easier to use.
>> Terrific.
Thank you Danna.
There was another question that came in
about genealogy and I sent out the link
to the reading room and somebody highlighted
the resources for the ask a librarian.
I'm going to ask Cheryl if there's anything
that came in while I was going through the Q&A
that we should address before we sign off.
>> I haven't seen anything that
you haven't already caught.
>> Terrific.
>> Thanks everybody for a
really amazing conversation.
>> Yes, so and well done to our presenters.
Danna, Cheryl, and Stacie, thank you so much.
Mike, thanks for pitching in
there and feeding URLs out.
These events work well because of your
active participation and so we want
to thank you to the participants for coming.
As it's been mentioned, we are having
webinars every Wednesday this summer
and next week we're doing a session on
[inaudible] books and primary sources
and that will be hosted by our former
teacher in residence Tom Bober,
an elementary school librarian
and real thought leader
on using primary sources
with students of all ages.
So we do hope that you will join us for that.
I'm going to ask Mike to put that URL in because
I can't talk and [inaudible] at the same time.
So again, thank you so much for joining us.
I hope that you will join us for all
of our Wednesday sessions this summer
but definitely tune in next week for
the primary sources and picture books.
It's going to be a great
hour just like this one was.
So Danna, Cheryl, Stacie, any parting thoughts?
>> Save the chat.
>> Thank you.
>> Yes, save the chat.
And also join us for office
hours on Tuesday same time.
This coming week is going to be super
cool with the curator for cartoons,
Sara Duke talking about political
cartoons of the 20th century.
>> Just thanks everyone again
for such a terrific conversation.
>> Alright, well thank you all and
we hope to see you next Wednesday.