Heather Gorton

Welcome to the start of Spring Semester! To kick things off, this week we have a guest post from Heather Gorton. Heather is an Eastern alum, class of 2009 (BA in History), who went on to attend University at Albany, State University of New York where she earned a Master of Science in Information Science (MSIS) in 2011. I asked Heather why she choose to go to library school and she respond with “What really peaks my interest in Library Science is how libraries use new technology and resources such as tablets, instructional videos and LibGuides in order to reach out to their users.”

For our first blog post of 2014, Heather shares with us her role in creating Warner Library’s first ebook…

Warner Library is proud to announce the arrival of our new National Library of Medicine (NLM) Handbook. This handbook was created as a guide for Eastern’s Health Sciences students to use the National Library of Medicine catalog, Locator Plus, PubMed, PubMed Central and NCBI Bookshelf in order to find information for their research. My role in the project involved creating the text and the corresponding website.

First, I examined the websites and databases for the National Library of Medicine catalog, Locator Plus, PubMed, PubMed Central and NCBI Bookshelf and experimented with different terms for the search process.

Next, the text was created using Microsoft Word where we provided an explanation of how to search and use the different features of the resources.

After the text was created, my next task was to create the NLM Handbook website using Google Sites. Mark began the process by creating the home page and the formatting for the site and I created the following pages based on his example. Each chapter of the book was assigned to its own page and the text from the Word document was copied and pasted onto the pages of the website.

Next, I revisited the websites to get screen captures of the steps of the search process for each resource. Recalling my experience capturing images for a training manual that I created from my previous office position, I attempted to capture the images using the print screen controls on my computer and then crop and paste them onto the web pages. Unfortunately, the tools in the Google Sites editor would not allow me to properly crop the images so that it would show the information on the web page and not the entire computer screen. So I had to find an alternative method for capturing images. Luckily at the time, I was working on a project for the library at SUNY New Paltz where I used the screen capture software Jing to obtain the necessary pictures for the project. By using the capturing tool, I was able to copy either the entire web page or focus on a specific area and paste it onto the site. However, after saving my changes, the images no longer appeared on the pages. It was then I realized that the reason why the images were missing was due to the fact that the files were not uploaded to Google Sites. I recaptured and saved the images and then uploaded them to the website. Even though it took some trial and error, in the end, we successfully applied our book to our site and completed the project.

My time on this project was a very enjoyable experience and it’s very exciting to see all of our hard work come to life on a mobile device where it can benefit the members of the Eastern University community.”

Want to see the finished product? Check it out in Apple’s iBookstore (search for “National Library of Medicine for the Health Sciences Student”; free) or visit the Internet Archive at http://archive.org/details/NLMStudentHandbookCopy to download it in a couple different formats (PDF, Kindle, EPUB, etc.).