The Library now subscribes to two online  dictionaries, and who would have know that dictionaries really were this much fun.  The first is The Oxford English Dictionary, and it has the definitions of over 600,000 words with millions of quotations from historical documents.  Some of the words you'll find pretty amusing.  For example, your parents have been going away for the weekend to guddle but they won’t tell you what they’re up to?  Look up guddle and you see that it is to catch fish with your bare hands.

And if you want a real laugh, look up LOL. It's defined as

Originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: ‘ha ha!’; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement.

LOL actually goes back to the late 80s. There's a quote from May 8, 1989 from an early online message board, FidoNews, “LOL – Laughing Out Loud”.

Our other new online dictionary, Oxford Dictionaries, is less historical and more current.  They define LOL a little differently:

(chiefly in electronic communication) used to draw attention to a joke or amusing statement, or to express amusement:  I love how you said ‘coffee is not my cup of tea’. LOL!

More fun uses:

Miss Manners says that nicknames are useful for when you forget your spouse's name.  Maybe you've used the term "Dear" a bit too often.  Type in "dear" using the thesaurus option by the search bar, and you get a few choice words: dearest, darling, sweetheart, pet.

Pet?  When did people start calling their beloved pet?  With the link over towards the right side of the page, you can go back to Oxford English Dictionary, where it defines Pet as  

a. An indulged, spoiled, or favourite, child.
b.Any person who is indulged, spoiled, or treated as a favourite, esp. in a way that others regard with disapproval. Also (occas.) used of a thing.
c. A sweet, obedient, or obliging person. Freq. used as a term of endearment, or as a familiar form of address.

Of course, calling someone a pet is kind of patronizing.  To answer my question, though, there is a quotes from as far back as the 18th century.  So people still use pet, but how about not forgetting your spouse's name? 

There are too many interesting and cool features in these dictionaries to list them all here but here is one more:  Are you a writer working on an historical novel?  On the advanced search page you can indicate both usage and origin of words.  So if you need words from the Indian subcontinent to describe a woman, you can end up with a list of words: begum, Devi, memsahib, shrimati.   There are definitions so you will know if you're making the right choice.

That’s all I have time for this post. Farewell, adieu, au revoir, ciao, adios; bye, bye-bye, so long, see you later, see you, sayonara; bon voyage; cheers, and toodle-oo!

Even though the Daily Herald website is now going behind a paywall, you can still access the full text articles as they appear in the paper (minus photos).  It's through our subscription with ProQuest Newsstand.  This is a large collection of Daily Herald articles going all the way back to 1997so you will be able to gather a lot of background information.

It doesn't look like the Herald website, and you need to know what you're looking for.  Here are some tips for making it easier:

1. Follow this link to The Daily Herald
2.  Click on Advanced search link.
3. Put key words into the search box.
4.  Limit by date using the drop down menu.
5.  Click the search button.
6.  The results will presented newest to oldest.

Since this is a database more than a news website, the articles are delayed by 24 to 48 hours. But if you want to browse all the articles from a particular day, here are the directions for that:

1.  Underneath where it says Daily Herald (Chicago), select the Publications button.
2.  There is really only one link in the results.  It says Daily Herald, so click on it.
3. This brings you to the page containing the publication information.  In the lower portion there's a section that says "Browse specific issues," and there are date ranges divided by decades.  Click the + sign in front of the decade you wish to expand.
4.  Then expand the year.
5.  Expand the month
6.  Now select the date you wish to browse
7.  From here you will have a listing of all the articles in alphabetical order by title.

Need a workable lease for your tenants?  Hiring someone to teach your child piano?  Writing your last will?  Need power of attorney?

The Library has thousands of Illinois-specific legal forms available for you through our web-resource,  Legal Forms Library. 

Even if you don't need, for example, a prenuptial agreement or a service contract, it's just interesting to see what forms are available, and you never know when you'll need a document to make your life feel more secure.

But Legal Forms Library includes more than just documents for you to fill in. There is a Law Digest area which summarizes state laws for the average person.  There is also has a Legal Q&A section.  These are real-life questions.  Some are simple, such as "How do I adopt my niece?" Others are much more complex, such as the one about the angry aunt who wrote a stingy Will out of spite but then tried to amend it when in a better mood but then died.  The answers to these questions can be lengthy and refer back to the Law Digest and the Legal Forms sections. 

Search Hint for Legal Forms
You have the option of searching either categories or titles.  When searching, it is very helpful to search both because they do pull up different titles.

 Last month, a charismatic media personality gave an unusual rendering of Paul Revere's late night ride.  There is not going to be a recounting of that even here, but it is interesting that some of her fans began to edit the Paul Revere article in Wikipedia to reflect her telling. You must be familiar with Wikipedia, an editable encyclopedia.  Anyone can edit it, and it is a good place to begin research but sometimes suffers from pranks and political leanings.

And just the other day, another certain politician claimed that John Quincy Adams was a founding father.  Of course, it soon followed that the John Quincy Adams article at Wikipedia was changed.  In their editing notes, someone wrote, "Please don't edit an historical article based on current events."  Wikipedia is a good place to go for information about music or television shows, but it has its limits.

If you're looking for an authoritative resource to learn about history, and you don't want to be at the mercy of someone with a bias, check out our unique web resource Salem History.  Every time the Library purchases a reference book from Salem Press in the field of history, we get an online version of it for free.  What's special about this is that while most Reference books cannot be checked out for long, the online version is available to you anywhere you have access to the Internet and your Library card. 

The specific volumes we have in Salem History include the decades from the 1930s to the 90s, a biographical dictionary of great athletes, a series of encyclopedias about great events from history including a set about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender events.  And if you're interested in health, environmentalism, the solar system, and literature, there are Salem databases for these as well.  You can see the listing here.

So if you want an authoritative website to get your history from, check out Salem History.  Here, at least, you know you're getting quality material that isn't influenced by someone's spontaneous wish to "change history" to suit the political climate.

 
Blow me down!  One of the great things we have through the Library is Mango Languages, a web-based language learning resource.  Mango does some cool things as promotion. Right now they're teaching the language of Piratry… the piratical language…..  You know, it's the language pirates speak!  

The Library has two valauble resources for making decisions as a consumer. You are probably familiar with the magazine Consumer Reports. The Library owns the actual print magazine back to 2006.  But good news!  The Library now has access to PDF copies of every issue since the mid-1980s thanks to MasterFILE Premier.  There are 1,700 magazines and other resources in this database, and doing a specific search for articles in Consumer Reports is tricky.* 

But more good news!  On either of these pages, Web Resources by Title or Web Resources by Subject, you can locate a box that will search only Consumer Reports in MasterFILE Premier. Thus you can get all the Consumer Reports articles about that refrigerator you are tempted to buy.

The other review source is Chicago Consumers' Checkbook (for use only in the Library). We also get this in print, and you can find them in the Business Reference area. This resource specializes in evaluations of local servcies including medical, home, automotive and retail.  The evaulations are based on consumer surveys, filed complaints, and Checkbook's own price surveys.  Though there are reviews for businesses, they won't appear in the database until the business has accumulated 10 reviews.  Chicago Consumers' Checkbook is also a great place to go to get specialized reviews:

• Top Doctors – both peer reviewed and public reviewed
• Hospital reviews with government data and physician surveys
• Auto and homeowners insurance

Coming soon to our Reference site will be a comprehensive list of review sites, most which you can access from home, but all available in the Library. 

 *  If you want to search for a specific magazine in MasterFILE Premier, we have a shortcut to that.  On our Library's specialized e-journals search page, you can locate the resource for many magazines and newspapers.    Just type the name of the journal you want in the search box, and hit enter.  The results will show you the start and end date for them as well as links into that magazine's research page.  Here you can browse through all the issues or do a specific search.

And one more thing!  While writing this post, a project I was working on early - a list of 40 consumer resource sites – has been put onto the Library webpage.  You can find it here.

MasterFILE Premier is one of the Library’s newest web resource. They describe themselves as the “definitive multidisciplinary, full-text reference database.”  Whew!  What it is, really, is the place to go for magazine articles for pleasure or research.   It’s where you can go to read Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, BET, and Consumer Reports.  There are over 1,800 newspapers, magazines, TV and radio transcripts, and journals.  If you check often, you might even read articles that haven’t yet made it to the newsstand.

If you remember a web resource called General OneFile, this is its replacement.  The Library made the switch to MasterFILE hoping everyone would enjoy access to Consumer Reports and Time.  Actually, MasterFILE Premier is the only place to go for full backfiles of Consumer Reports in PDF format going back to 1985.  So if you want to read an original review of a used car back when it was new, this is a good resource for that.  And since PDF looks just like reading the magazine it makes for a pleasant bit of researching.

Ebsco has created some pretty decent videos showing how to search MasterFILE, and I've linked to them here.

Basic Search Tutorial

Working with Results