Week 1: Introduction

Welcome and congratulations on deciding to participate in this self-paced online learning opportunity. Not only will you come away more familiar with OPL’s digital content offerings, you can win some nifty stuff in the process! If you have any questions about the process, please visit our FAQs page. 

Let's dive right in with a quick overview of OPL's digital resources. All digital content at OPL are available 24-7, whenever you’re online. This has its obvious advantages - mainly that it allows for access - but yes, you do need a computer or a device of some kind, and as you'll see, some resources are much easier to use than others.

The main entry for OPL's digital offerings is our website, at www.oaklandlibrary.org. Our public website is built on an open-source content management system called Drupal (https://www.drupal.org) and Sharon McKellar is the ‘webmaster’ for all content. Many other staff contribute event calendar listings, blog posts, and manage different sections of the website. Our website is a ‘responsive’ site, meaning that it looks great and functions well across various devices, including smartphones. We also have different sites set up for teens (http://oaklandlibrary.org/teens) and kids (http://oaklandlibrary.org/kids), with different styles/colors for each age group. Some other things to point out:

·        Our website also has links to OPL’s various social media presences on the top right corner.

·        We have four blogs written by librarians – you can see them all at http://www.oaklandlibrary.org/blogs.

You can search the catalog directly from the website, too. A site search option is also in the planning stages, but if you need to do a site search, you can use any search engine for the same results.

For eBooks and eAudioBooks and eMagazines: We have a rich collection of fiction, non-fiction, magazines, and music for all ages that you can read, or listen to, on either your computer or a device like a smartphone or an ereader. And it’s a large collection – OverDrive has 10,369  titles, 3M Cloud Library has 1671 titles, and OneClickDigital has 114 titles, and Zinio has 167 magazines available. 

We also have a number of amazing databases – we’ll highlight a few of the most popular ones in this training session, but briefly, library databases are the set of subscription online resources that we provide for our patrons to use.  You can see a complete list on our public website at this link: http://oaklandlibrary.org/online-resources/articles-and-databases.Some of them are collections of periodical articles, others include book recommendations, while others have car repair information.  Databases are also sometimes known as electronic resources, eResources, online subscriptions, and many other names, none of which is very descriptive. Please  be sure to look over our FAQs about databases on this page: http://oaklandlibrary.org/online-resources/articles-and-databases/opl-databases-frequently-asked-questions.

There are two main ways to access online resources. The first is through the public website: go to our public website, at www.oaklandlibrary.org and click on “Online Services” link on the top of the page to get a full listing; you can also click on the two links in the “I want to…” section on the left for ebooks and online services. Second, for most collections, you can enter its name in our catalog and search for it. For example, try searching for “Zinio” – the first result will give you the link you can use to see a full listing of all of Zinio’s online magazines.

An important note: If you have any account problems, just as you can’t check out physical books, you can’t check out eBooks, either. So, if your library card has expired, or your fine is too high, you won’t be able to download eBooks; you’ll be able to access databases, though.

DISCOVERY EXERCISES:

You have until Monday, February 9, to complete these exercises below. Don’t forget to leave a comment to register your participation (the Leave a Comment link is under this post).  Tell us your name. 

1. What would you add to the website to make it easier to use OPL's digital resources? 

2.  If you want to get an ereader that you can use with library ebooks, which one would you get? Which one would you avoid? Why? If you already have an ereader, which one is it? Would you recommend it to a friend? Why or why not?

Once you've answered both exercises in a comment, go bid on a prize on one of the prize pack pages! You will need to leave your full name so we can contact you if you win.