Quit Freaking Out!

Today was my last day of teaching middle school social studies, a job that I thought was the best job in the world, until our dynamic school librarian decided to retire. Like an optimist, I applied for her job and now I have one summer to figure out how the library really works. As I have been reading to prepare myself for this amazing job, I have to throw myself on my sword and admit to someone somewhere (or everyone everywhere) that one of the things that has surprised me the most (and by "surprised me" I mean made me want to freak out) is how often in the last week I have read the word "database".

I graduated college in 1991 and graduate school in 1992. No one that I knew was talking about databases then. I wrote my papers on my Macintosh and played with hypercard, but databases were not a thing, at least not a thing I knew about. In the last week terror has been struck into my heart as in article after article I read about librarians' successes teaching students and teachers to use databases. Damn! Why don't I know how to use databases?! What are databases? I thought they were something companies used to store phone numbers and other data. They sound almost sinister, like something a dictatorship would use to keep tabs on its people. 

I did what any well-meaning but ignorant-to-the-ways-of-databases person would do in my situation, I Googled "how to use a database for library research" on my MacBook Air. The Google Gods brought me to a helpful article from Prince George's Community College (where ironically I had an internship in 1992), called "Using Research Databases" ("Using Research Databases", 2017).  

"Okay, this is looking familiar" I thought as I scanned the article. This looks very familiar. This looks a lot like MARVEL!, Maine's Virtual Library. I hopped on over to MARVEL!, a resource that I have used with my students for years, and as I am sure you have guessed by now, MARVEL! is a database free to use in any Maine school or library. So my moral to my story today is, quit freaking out! 

References

LibGuides: Research Tutorial: Using Research Databases. (2017, May 30). Retrieved June 16, 2017, from http://pgcc.libguides.com/c.php?g=60038&p=385667