TSLA Learning 2.0 Week 2: Blogs and the Tennessee Electronic Library

Hey everybody! We've been having some technical difficulties here at the State Library in the past couple weeks - underground explosions, power outages, evacuations... I'm playing catch up right now in Learning 2.0 world, and I hope that others of you playing catch up in Nashville can join Tricia on Friday afternoon (Aug 10, 2007) at a date to be announced next week to get one-on-one, face-to-face help with your questions.

I have a confession to make. I do not use the Tennessee Electronic Library regularly. I'm continually looking for new ways that I can access for-fee databases (Oh, how I miss UTK's subscription to the OED Online), and I forget to check TEL first. When I was doing some research before buying a laptop, I PAID for an online subscription to Consumer Reports, not thinking about TEL, which provides access to the CR articles for free. D'oh!

I almost turned off the TEL tutorial before the real tutorial started because it took so long to load! But with patience as my guide, I picked up a couple resources in TEL that I wasn't aware of, e.g., the Multimedia resources tab (which led me to an NPR transcript from 2000 I hadn't seen before). I also got tickled by one of the sample searches: "labor violations" in AFL-CIO published materials - I hope the trainer developing the tutorial still has a job :)

This morning, I'm thinking about my friend Hector Black - 82 year old organic blueberry farmer in Cookeville, Julliard-trained pianist, World War II veteran, Harvard graduate, who moved with his wife Suzie to Atlanta in the sixties, lived a few blocks south of the Kings in Vine City (has stories of Coretta bringing over the casserole). He asked me a few weeks ago to look up some articles in the Atlanta Constitution about his time in Atlanta, and I've been stymied by the absence of a good index for the mid-sixties. Anyhoo, I did a search in TEL, and found a citation for Hector (having to do with organic farming): Reich, Lee, and Barbara Pleasant. "Native American fruits. (includes related article)." Organic Gardening 39.n2 (Feb 1992): 52(5). InfoTrac OneFile. Thomson Gale. TSLA. 9 Aug. 2007
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