Inquirer Columnist
Inquirer Columnist
It's on the Web. It's the Access PA POWER library. And it's just gotten more powerful.
A free service of Pennsylvania's public libraries, school libraries, and the State Library, the POWER Library offers access to thousands of full-text periodical articles, a newly expanded business database, newspapers, photographs, and reference materials for all age groups, all professions, on all subjects. For years, it has been the best information bargain in the state.
So what's new in the Power Library database suite?
The Lit Finder package has expanded to include a rich online anthology of poems, short stories, essays, speeches, and plays, much of it licensed, copyrighted material. Poem Finder offers more than 125,000 full-text poems, explanations, biographies and pictures, a glossary, poems in Spanish with translations, the Year's Best Poetry Anthology, and a Kids' Korner. Story Finder offers more than 5,000 full-text stories, biographies, explanations of stories and pictures, as well as a Just Published Stories Anthology. In the comprehensive Essay/Speech/Play Finder, you will find thousands of full-text essays, speeches from antiquity to modern times, and more than 1,000 complete plays.
The Auto Repair Reference Center provides complete, printable automotive repair information supplied by Nichols Publishing, publisher of the Chilton reference books.
Designed for children in grades two through eight, the award-winning FactsforLearning offers significant curricular content in separate elementary and middle school interfaces. Among the grade-appropriate goodies for parents, teachers and students are current events features, Weekly Reader archives back to 2000, ScienceSpin (for science news); more than 700 activities from Teacher Created Materials and custom reference libraries. Perhaps most impressive is the collection of full-text online reference books from Gareth Stevens and World Almanac Education that include heavily requested state and country research materials.
Oxford Reference Online contains more than 100 of the publisher's respected dictionaries and reference guides in such areas as science, language and literature, government and law. The books can be searched individually or across the database.
HW Wilson's Biography Reference Bank offers full-text articles, abstracts and photographs from periodicals, feature articles, interviews, essays, performance reviews, speeches and obituaries.
Two NoveList products now guide teachers, librarians, and students to just the right books for both K-8 and for high school/adult reading. The databases have book discussion guides, book talks, classroom activities, readability measures, book reviews, and comprehensive subject indexing.
And in even more powerful news, NetLibrary is the newest product to join the POWER Library. The comprehensive collection of e-books will allow users full-text searchable access to more than 40,000 titles in the arts, history, literature, religion, science, sociology, business, technology and fiction, including the entire collections of such publishers as HarperCollins. Users may check books out for four- to eight-hour periods. Pennsylvania now is the only state making this entire collection available.
Also brand-new is the Health Video Database, a collection of 300 five- to 10-minute consumer health and patient information videos. Videos are organized by subject and offer material in layman's terms, presenting conditions and remedies. Some videos are available in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and Vietnamese.
"We are the only state in the country that will have this resource, and we are making it available in schools, homes and every library of every type," said Joseph Scorza, executive director of the HSLC (the new name for Health Sciences Libraries Consortium), manager of the ACCESS PA databases.
At the library, you may access this content with a simple click. To use the POWER Library at home, get a library card if you do not already have one. Bookmark your log-in site and log in with the bar code number on your library card.
For those of you new to the POWER Library, visit www.powerlibrary.net/Find.htm to find your library's log-in site.