CLA Weblog Submissions
To navigate our archives, please click on a category to the left. Do you have information that would be of interest to the library community? Please send your weblog submissions to the CLA office at info@cla-net.org.
Websites and Primary Resources
The Tulare County Library invites librarians to visit our reference blog, found on www.tularecountylibrary.org. This blog is accessible via the drop down menu under Ref/Research.
Our reference blog is updated monthly with quality (and free) websites, such as a site that helps people learn languages. Another, called "gethuman" gives the best way to reach a customer service person by phone. The newest site added is for the CFDA. Also, there is a great website for primary and preschool children further down. We invite your comments!
If you go to our digital resources further down on that menu, you'll go to the middle of a page. Scroll up and you'll see an icon for the oral histories digitized about the years 1941-1946. There are 101 interviews here, all very different, that shed light on the activities happening in the San Joaquin Valley of California during that time. Some people also went to San Francisco and Los Angeles, and their stories are here. Some went overseas. Some went to internment camps. Some went to other parts of the United States. There is a short abstract of each interview so you can pick and choose which primary resources you want to use.
Another digital resource is photos for the San Joaquin valley. Although this is available, it is a work in progress and can be searched by subject or location. Another icon there is Calisphere, a history site maintained at the University of California that includes pictures in California history from libraries all over the state, both academic and public.
Scroll down and you'll find papers from Allensworth, the small town, now a State Park in Tulare County founded by Colonel Allensworth, a black man, and settled by our black citizens one hundred years ago until the lack of water resources ended this community. You will also find cards with the various resources in our history room collection regarding Allensworth.
The icon called "Shades of Tulare County" contains pictures documenting the local history of our Japanese and Chinese populations. There are over 400 pictures and descriptions. Then in 2002, Tulare County's Sesquicentennial year, the library went to all our branches and collected historical photographs of life in Tulare County during the past 150 years. That collection can be searched through a pull down menu on the upper left side.
Finally, we've added special lists of books on our front page that changes every month.
One list includes books being read by members of our staff and the other is a theme related list of nonfiction books.
Calisphere was pleased to let us put their icon on our page so people could search for digital images all over this state. There is contact information there if you would like to do this for your web site also. This is just a short review of free resources developed or borrowed by librarians and staff members at the Tulare County Library. Now we invite you to write about special resources that you have on your websites that might interest the rest of us.
Submitted to California Libraries by:
Judith Wood
Reference Librarian III
Tulare County Library
The Tulare County Library is an Institutional Member of CLA and directly supports our advocacy programs. Click here for more information on Institutional Membership.
Posted on November 25, 2009 9:00 AM | Permalink