A Visit to the GooglePlex

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeThanks to the wonderful tour committee at BayNet I was able to make my second visit to the GooglePlex in Mountain View on Thursday evening.


The first time was a visit several years ago sponsored by CSLA Northern Region 4. It's my understanding that Google suspended tour groups for a while after that visit so I was pleasantly surprised when we were able to arrange this trip to the Google campus.


Katherine Bevcar arranged for a great speaker, Dan Russell, to talk about "Sensemaking."
Dan is a leader in the field of search in general and using Google specifically to best effect. On his blog, SearchReSearch, Dan regularly poses some very interesting search challenges.


By the end of his presentation, which included some interaction -- all participants were using laptops with the Chrome OS -- I realized a couple things: first, there's an awful lot going on at Google which even the most avid fan doesn't know about unless they are really digging, and second, there are many tools Google has developed to help us make sense of information for our selves and our patrons.


I'll just point to one of the sites Dan mentioned.


Google Insights for Search allows the user to find and compare various topics and how they have been searched over time. Search, for example, "turkey" and you will find (no great surprise) that it has a rhythm peaking each year in November. You can compare various terms in the same chart and see how they relate in interesting ways.

Karlene's Birthday

To celebrate Library Specialist, Karlene Caldwell's birthday a couple weeks ago budget secretary, Margaret Catelli, brought these wonderful mini-cupcakes from the Teacake Bakeshop in Corte Madera. And a fun time was had by all!

End of a Great Year

The Bessie Chin Library staff would like to congratulate those of you with graduating seniors, say good-bye to those whose last child is leaving Redwood and welcome the parents of incoming ninth graders. From their freshman year through graduation we like think we play a crucial part in helping students succeed and develop as young, maturing adults. We’ll miss the seniors, who have spent a lot of time in the library over the years learning how to access and use information for many school and personal projects. Our goal in the library is to graduate young adults who can think for themselves, who love literature and who can find and use information creatively and ethically. We look forward to meeting the incoming ninth graders in the fall and introducing them to all the wonderful resources of the Bessie Chin Library.

As the school year comes to a close we’d also like to express a big thank you from the whole Redwood community to our library volunteers who have performed all sorts of tasks this year to make our terrific programs so successful. A big thank you goes to returning volunteers Richard Henerlau, Peter Martin, Jessica Carroll, Jennifer Stevens, and Amalia Molineaux. And thanks to our new volunteers this year, Lynn Bullock and Angeles Herrero. No matter how many hours you were able to put in over the course of the year, your time was very much valued and appreciated. Think about joining them next fall if you’d like to provide a valuable and fun service to Redwood.

We hope everyone has a happy and restful summer and remind everybody in the Redwood community that a great way to beat the heat is to READ! Book Passage will provide a small donation to the Redwood library for every book purchased when Redwood is mentioned. Encourage your children to read “just for fun,” reading something they’d never have time for during the regular school year. Now is the time to stretch and grow in weird and wonderful ways.

Remember that even though the physical library is closed during the summer, the Redwood Learning Commons is open 24/7 all year round. You have access to a large assortment of online subscription databases from the library’s home page. You can see a list of user names (IDs) and passwords by clicking on the DATABASE PASSWORDS link and entering the word “giants” in the box.

This year has been an exciting one for the library with the addition of all sorts of new materials, continued improvements to library automation system (all the schools in the District are now sharing the same catalog database), improvements to the library website, and the addition of new databases. Next year should prove just as fruitful and we look forward to seeing you all at Back-to-School night in the fall.

College Library Prompt 3

What was the most important thing you learned in this project? What did you like most about this project in general? What would you change?

College Library Prompt 2

What surprised you about the library site (UCSF) we explored today? Name one particular tool or resource on the site that you think students of that school would find particularly helpful.

College Library Prompt 1

What surprised you about the TRAILS-12 assessment? What information literacy skill(s) do you think you need more practice with?

How to transfer your purchased Google eBook to your eReader

More and more folks are purchasing and using e-books these days. (E-book sales on Amazon just surpassing print book sales). Here's short video about how you can transfer your Google e-books to various e-book readers.