Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host over here Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar. We're a webcast, an online show. There's some disagreement on what to call these things. We don't care what you call us, but we're here live, online, every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. Call us what you want, but come and watch. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, you can always watch our recordings. We do record every week, so you can go on our website and see all of that. Both our live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So definitely, you know, share the information with your colleagues out there. We do a mixture of things here on the show, presentations, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos, which is pretty much what we're doing today. We bring in guest speakers sometimes, but sometimes we also have Nebraska Library Commission staff, which is what we have today, a whole group. Today we have Debra Dregos and Susan Nisley and Alana Nabati, I want to order there, from well, Technology and Access Services Department Australia. And after the Library Commission. I'm here still. Who are our key people in charge of Nebraska Access, our database. Group of databases that we have. And apparently there's a ton of changes coming. And they're going to tell us everything you want to know about all the things that are happening in one hour. Or whatever it takes. Whatever we can get into one hour. So I will hand over the mouse to you guys. You can do Go ahead and take it away. Thanks, Krista. And as Krista said, and if you read the description for the session today, we are going to be talking about 13 new databases That we are going to be subscribing to from EBSCO. But I thought I'd start off this morning with just some information about Nebraska Access. The Nebraska Library Commission requested and received funding for statewide subscription to informational databases and started offering them through Nebraska Access in 1999. Since then, the databases of offerings have changed very little as we have not been able to increase the funding to subscribe to additional databases. Or to expand access for the ProQuest eLibrary database to the K-12 schools. We have asked for additional funding in our budget multiple times to extend access for eLibrary. But we have not been successful in that. And in fact, in 2010, because of state budget cuts, we did have to drop the Kiplinger database and we negotiated either flat or even one highly reduced renewal pricing for the other databases that are in Nebraska Access. Over the years, librarians have asked for K-8 content. They've asked for novelist, small business information and other content. So when the EBSCO representatives approached us earlier this year with a proposal to bundle 13 databases, which would be available to all types of libraries at a price that is less than we are currently paying for five of the databases, which includes the eLibrary that has the restricted access, we had to give it really serious consideration. Not only will this bundle save the commission money, but it also saves money for libraries who are subscribing to some of these databases and it helps out those libraries that cannot afford to subscribe to these databases. The content of the EBSCO general interest databases, the genealogy database and novelist does overlap with databases that will be dropped this coming year. But there's a lot of new content too. The databases that will not be available after July 1st are HeritageQuest online, which is, if I can move the screen here, which is our genealogy database, but there is a replacement genealogy database, eLibrary, the Omnifile Full Text Select and Books and Print. The Biography Reference Bank will still be available. It is an EBSCO product and it will, we are told, eventually combine with the Biography Reference Center, which will also be available to you now. WorldCat and FirstSearch will also be available after July 1st. The 13 EBSCO databases that will be live for all the Nebraska residents to access from any library, school, work, or home on July 1st will be available through this same URL. This page will just totally change and we'll show you what that will look like here in just a couple minutes. The same Nebraska Access passwords that you are currently using will still work, as will your IP addresses, Nebraska driver's licenses, and state IDs. Access for library staff will be available later today so that you have a chance to look over these databases. An email will be sent out over the Nebraska Access, the systems, and the trial mailing lists to provide you with a temporary web link and a unique password. This site is meant only to be available to library staff, not the public, so please do not post this on your website or hand it out to your customers. We will also be putting up a customizable press release announcing the new databases and that will be placed on the library's toolbox within the library commission's website. Susan is currently working on setting up database roadshow trainings around the state. She has two set up right now for later in August and she's working on others. There will also be recorded webinars about each of the databases and so those will be available live or to watch through recordings at a later date. So watch for emails announcing times and places for those training sessions. On another note before we get into the EBSCO databases, you may have heard that OCLC is transitioning from the first search interface, which includes the world cap database. Their new interface is called WorldCat Discovery Service. The commission will make a change to this new interface later this fall. There are differences not only in the look of the interface and the way it works, but we've had several issues as far as access goes that we've had to work through and it has taken some time. As part of that move, Elana will be asking all the schools and libraries for updated IP information. So if you get that email, please let us know so that we make sure our information is up to date. This relates to the fact that each library that does OCLC cataloging and or interlibrary loan has been assigned a unique URL for access to this WorldCat Discovery Service by OCLC. So if your library has static IP addresses, but you still send your patrons through the Nebraska and Elana is frowning at me and we've gone back and I'll tell you we've gone back and forth with OCLC and between ourselves so often on the authentication process that it's gotten very confusing. So I'll just say the setup can be rather complex. So we'll be talking to you, those interlibrary loan and cataloging libraries possibly individually or as just the subset of all the libraries at a later time to get all of that straightened out. So back to the new EBSCO databases and the preview site. This is the website that you will be sent to and I'm not going to tell you what the password is. You'll get that in the email, but once you go in, you'll see that we actually have now laid out the web page in two sections. At the top, we have databases that can be used by anyone, could be of interest to anyone. And then towards the bottom, we have highlighted those databases that are could be especially useful to the K-12 population, but that doesn't mean that only students may use them. All of these are available to everybody. So I'm going to turn this over to Susan and Alana and they are going to do overviews of each of the databases. This is Alana and Susan and I are going to fairly quickly just kind of highlight what is in each of these resources with our limited amount of time. We're only going to spend a couple minutes, so this is definitely not a training session or anything like that. We just kind of want to give you a preview of what's available. And we're kind of going to skip around a little bit here in the order. The first database I want to actually start talking about is the master file. Before jumping into that, I also want to point out you will see these question marks on the page. These will take you to the about or help information. And I want to point these out because we do include on these pages links to the title lists. I always find it useful to go into a title list to see what journals, magazines and other resources are included in a database. And as we move forward and develop more training material, we're also going to probably have more help information available at the bottom of the screen, but Susan and I are still working on that, so it'll be a few weeks before that probably comes about. So I'm going to jump back and I'm going to go ahead and get into the master file. The master file is one of the more general databases in the collection. If your go-to database before was the Omni file, I would suggest the master file would be the database you want to start using to start with. The master file contains more than 2200 full text magazines and journals covering a variety of topics. As I mentioned, it's a great database for general research for adults and students. In addition to the journals and magazines, there's also a thousand reference books and 55,000 primary source documents. So it's a wide variety of information. I also want to point out that those we're starting talking about the journals and magazines, the coverage of them will vary from title to title, but there are a couple of titles that actually go back to 1923. For example, the Saturday evening post goes back to coverage was back to 1931 and that is available as PDFs. So I pulled up a few of those. It's kind of fun to look at the covers of those magazines. Time also goes back to 1923. I think those could be good resources if you're studying something from a time period. To go back and see how that issue was covered during that time period in those periodicals. Some other great journals and magazines that are included in the database are going to be Consumer Reports and Consumer Report Buying Guides. I'm very excited to have those in there personally because we always have something it seems like to buy and it's great to be able to go in there and see what their reviews are and recommendations are. I think a lot of people across the state will get a lot of views out of those magazines and the Buying Guide. Otherwise, you need to subscribe yourself personally to Consumer Reports. Or go and get the paper copy of the library. I'm really excited about those. There are a lot of other journals and more academic titles in there too, but I also wanted to highlight some of the time content that for those of you who've been around long enough, you may remember we lost some of the time content from the Wilson databases. I didn't look at the exact date of it, but it's been a few years ago, but now we will have access to journals such as Sports Illustrated, Cooking Light, People, Field and Stream, Country Living. Don't think of these just as all hardcore research titles in here, but there's also some more general purpose magazines that you could be of use. So I'm going to go ahead and just do just one quick search in here. So I just went and did a search for Digital Camera. Looking at this interface, I'm sure most people recognize it. This looks just like the interface we had for the OmniFile and the Biographies Database. So you should be used to the interface. The first one here I just wanted to point out is Digital Camera Basics, and this is one of those consumer report buying guides. And I'm just going to jump right into the PDF of this document just to show you that it looks just like you would get if you were looking at the regular paper version of the consumer reports with their little nice handy charts. One other thing I did want to point out about the master file, this database actually contains full text, and it also has just some abstracts and indexing. So if you do want to limit your search to full text, there is a nice limit here over the left hand side that will easily allow you to limit your search results to just the full text. Those of you who went to Rojo's in the past will remember Alana and I complaining about the full text limiter when our database was at 100% full text. Now finally... It has a purpose as well. So I know that was a real quick overview, but I need to keep moving so I give Susan enough time to talk about the other databases. There's a couple of ways we can go back and forth to select different databases. You can see here I just clicked on the Choose Database option. I could choose a different database here or of course I can go back to the preview site.  So the primary search is designed specifically for elementary age students. It has full text and articles from 70 popular elementary school magazines. Some of those magazines include things such as Boys Life, National Geographic Kids, Ranger Rick, Time for Kids, and Sports Illustrated for Kids. Now also included in this database is the Funk and Wagner's New World Encyclopedia which I'm sure a lot of school folks will be happy to see. There's also the Encyclopedia of Animals and the American Heritage Children's Dictionary. So let me just show you a quick search here. Nebraska, I know that's done a very exciting search but I did want to point out again, I'm going to limit it to full text. Over here on the right there's source types and I just want to point out that there are different source types available in this database so it's easy to go maybe if you want to see some of the primary source documents. So you can see now we have the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln-Douglas debates so that could be useful. In the other search I wanted to do I was talking with my nephew last night and he was doing something with Minecraft. So I just wanted to point this one out because I thought librarians who are maybe doing story hour or working for things with kids also could find this useful because the first article that I pulled up was you can make some Minecraft ornaments so just keep that in mind to don't think of it as just a children's resource. Adults who work with children may also find it useful. It's a little bit fun to make. I'm going to go ahead and jump back again to the preview and I'm not going to take the time to get into it but right now we do have a link right here for the Funkin' Wagonal New World Encyclopedia so if you have students that want to jump right into the Encyclopedia and just search that you can obviously do that by clicking that button and following the link. I'm going to go ahead then and scroll back up the screen here and the next two databases I want to talk about are going to be the Psychology and Behavioral Science Collection and the Science and Technology Collection. These two databases are also going to be in that same EPSCO interface. I'm in right now, I'm on the Psychology and Behavioral Science Collection. This one offers a full text coverage with broad range of subjects in the field of Psychology, Behavioral Sciences and Related Discipline. There are, excuse me, more than 530 scholarly journals with an extensive bad file included in here. Now at first just hearing that name, Psychology and Behavioral Science, you may think, okay now how would I use that and actually the more I think about it the more uses I have for this database. Obviously if you have students in high school or college who are taking those site classes they may need to do some research but there's also maybe community members or even teachers in the school system or counselors that could benefit from research in this database and also think about parents who maybe have their children has been diagnosed with having ADHD or dyslexia or things like that and they want to do more research about those particular topics. This is a great resource to go to. I didn't recognize a lot of the titles in the list but a couple that it stood out to me were there's the elementary school guidance and counseling is one of the titles in there. There's also one about professional school counseling so I think those both could be helpful. I'm going to go ahead and do a search on bullying in schools. Again you can see I got a number of results and now again this is a mixture of resources that are available in full text and some that are just abstracts and indexing and again there is that full text limiter so if that's important to you. I'm just going to go ahead and use this choose database link right now. I'm going to go ahead and uncheck psychology and I'm going to jump right into science and technology collection. So the science and let me get rid of that search here. Science and technology collection, it has the full text from over 830 leading scholarly journals and covers many scientific and technology subject areas including things like aviation, biology, chemistry, computer technology so I was thinking about those topics and again I thought oh now what do I want to know about those but one thing that's in the news way too much lately are drones. Whoops are drones. If I could type drones maybe I don't know. That's why they have the suggestions for you. I think I should have never drive for me. So you can see here now who controls drones. Here's just a full text story about them. So I really do think this database will get a lot of views. Like I said don't be kind of scared off by that title of science. I'm going to jump back to the preview page here again and I am not going to jump into it but again Debra had mentioned the biography reference bank that is the database we currently have and the link is here and it will take us just the same interface we have now. Then the last database I want to point out before turning things over to Susan is my heritage and this is the genealogy resource that is available now from EFSCO and I have to say trying to talk about this database in three or four minutes I think is impossible because there's just so much cool stuff in it. I don't know where to begin. They have more than five billion historical records from 48 countries and billion with a B and 48 countries. So the genealogy resources we have had access to in the past really have focused on the United States. So this really is international. Like a lot of the genealogy products that are offered to libraries, my heritage, we have the MyHeritage Library Edition. They also have a version that the public can buy for access to for themselves at home. In that edition a lot of users can make family trees and so this library edition will actually search those family trees. So I was searching for Kovotny which is a Czech name if you didn't know that and I was coming up with family trees that were in Czechoslovakia because they were done by people who live in Czechoslovakia. So you could make out the names. I can't read Czech very well but I mean just so that really showed me just how international the coverage of this database is. So I'm really not going to try to find any one person here. I just want to show you a few things in the interface. So I'll search for John Novotny. You may want to check out the advanced search screen just because it kind of lets you control how the matching is exactly or not exactly. That's something more we'll cover when training information but so doing a search off this main screen is really just casting a very wide net. It's going to get you something from everything. So you can see over here in the left hand side it tells me how many hits I'm getting in the census and the birth records and photos and it goes on and on. You can also just have a nice summary that kind of groups them together. This I didn't mention it yet but it does include the U.S. Federal Census like we've had access to in the before in the past so that's all there. What I find helpful to do on this database is I'm going to jump back to the main screen here and it's not quite clear but you can see over here there are these 14 categories along the side. So if I want to look at census information I can click on it and now I'm searching across all census and you can see I'm listed here and you can see one of them here is actually the UK census and again all of these are links that I can click on and this will just narrow down what I'm searching in but the other thing I find useful is up here these descriptions. It will tell you exactly what these items are because looking at some of them by name I had no clue what they really were and what I was searching so especially the international things we've never had access to. Yes I yeah so going back here there are other interesting things that I found birth marriage and you know death records so there's England births and christinines let me jump back under immigration and travel I wanted to point out that there are some passenger lists which could be helpful so again 1500 to 1900 yeah and this one they're going to tell you how and how it's organized where the information come from so I I just wanted to point that out because I think it's easy to miss that information I think that really will help the genealogists out there kind of navigate this and the other thing I did want to mention I like I said I'm not going to be able to cover all these here but don't limit your thoughts to this only being useful for genealogists this also could be useful in schools if the students are studying people historical people I know I've been able to look up some of the first governor of Nebraska in here and find him in different places so it has a lot of wide possibilities if you just kind of go past the genealogy aspect of it so those were the databases I wanted to cover first here I want to turn it I'm going to turn it over to Susan now and let her carry on here with some more okay thank you and I'm going to go ahead and this might be dangerous but I'm going to start with novelist plus and novelist k8 plus because I really like them they're my favorite databases and it's probably uh my uh what's dangerous is I could probably talk about them too long um so I'm going to go ahead and start with them though because I like them um I'm going to go ahead and go into novelist plus first and I will just say um just to give you back on information on novelist plus it is really marketed as a reader's advisory tool it covers fiction and nonfiction for all ages and grades and I will say this about the nonfiction the nonfiction is nonfiction that appeals to readers reading for pleasure so that means things like biographies or narrative nonfiction you're not going to get things like textbooks or knitting for dummies or cookbooks things like that in here so that's one way to think about the type of nonfiction that's included nonfiction that people read for pleasure I think this is a database it's going to be really useful to us as librarians who have to do readers advisory service and also I think your patrons who really love books and love to read would really love this database too you could really get lost in it following links and getting ideas for what to read next um novelist plus was also recently updated with audiobook recommendations so those of you who have patrons who really love audiobooks um can highlight that to them novelist k8 plus as far as I can tell it truly is a subset of novelist plus meaning that everything that's a novelist k8 plus is also in novelist plus the value of the novelist k8 plus is that you can use it for students and they will then have to wade through all of the adult content as well one thing about novelist k8 plus is there is not audio but book coverage in that particular database yet so the other thing I want to mention about this database is there's lots of obviously you can find information about books in this database but there's lots of proprietary content that was written just for this database that is designed to help you with readers advisory so I'll try to point out that as we go along also um I'm going to go ahead and start out and just do a search for a book and I'm going to do a book that I know is in a series so this is going to be a good way I think for us to see what kind of information you can get in this database so I'm going to do bandcock eight and this is a record for this book and you will see you've got author it's an adult fiction title that is looks like it's an award winner if a book is in a series it will tell you that it's in a series and which place it is in the series if I click on this link it will take me to a series record that will list all the titles in the series in series order you will usually have a description or synopsis of the plot of the book so that's helpful if patrons are trying to get an idea if it's interesting to them or if they've read it before or maybe I might remind them if they've read it before true um and then this is something else it's fairly unique to novelist they use something called appeal terms to help them determine or help them recommend titles to patrons or help patrons find additional titles that they might like to read appeal terms go beyond things like subject matter or genre of the book so um it tried that the appeal terms try to tease out what it is about the book that really made you like it you could have books on the same subject but they're not going to necessarily appeal to a patron and I'm going to go ahead and just click here quickly and I would encourage you all to take a look at this screen at some point um this describes appeal terms and then I'm going to go to the appeals appeal terms page and this shows you all the kind of characteristics that you can use to search for books or that they assign to books to describe the sort of um flavor of the book so all of these different types of terms to uh assign to the characters in the book there's even snarky or uh relatable spirited um it's yeah information about storyline paste do you want fast paste do you want leisurely paste tone bittersweet body angst filled you can see these are not really describing the subject matter of the book or the genre but other characteristics that determine maybe why a patron liked a particular book so I would really encourage you to take a look at those terms later and you'll see how they're used throughout um so here again you've got these are the appeal terms that have been assigned to this book and the genre so it's a mystery story it's intricately plotted plot driven fast paced funny strong sense of place suspenseful etc writing style gritty so scrolling down you've got reviews from through from four different review sources here and then at the bottom of the page again you've got um different uh characteristics and terms that you can check if you want to perform a search for other titles that show the same characteristics so you can pick among the subjects the genres the appeal terms um going up again I want to point out to the right you've got read-alikes and if you hover over them it will tell you a little bit about the recommendation and it will tell you why it is considered a potential read-alike in this particular case this recommendation was made by a human and so it will tell you the name of the human that made this recommendation and it will tell you why it's similar these thrillers feature exotic settings taught suspense and unusual main characters etc so you'll understand why why is this similar and is that the similar is that the part of the book that really appealed to me um here's another one that I think has a human written reason for why it's related um going down here some of these are generated automatically using algorithms that I'm sure use those appeal terms in this particular case you'll see the reason um novelist recommends this uh let's see that was not as good of an example but some of these will tell you what appeal terms they have in common um and I'm like striking out here here we go these books are suspenseful plot driven fast paced they share the genre mystery stories and the subject murder investigation I think that's still auto generated I'm not created by a person but it tells you why they're similar one really nice feature if you're helping a patron is you have this view all option you can click on it and you have a list of all the suggested read-alikes along with the reason they're suggested and you can easily print it off and hand it to the patron and they can take it away with them also for each book uh it's not in all cases but some cases you'll get a link to first chapter and there will also be a link to goodreads uh which many of you might be familiar with um a site that you as any as an end user can create an account with and you'll get reviews from um readers uh they're not professionally used but they can still give you a good idea of whether it's a book that might interest you so I think that's a plus um I'm gonna go ahead and go back home now and obviously you can see lots of additional links around here that you can click on um you've got recommended reading lists and just notice that uh you can specify fiction adult teens ages 9 through 12 ages 0 through 8 or nonfiction and things aren't showing up um and this is something that I really want to point out well I would recommend that you click on all these links and see what's their lists and articles um spotlight on this is where you get some of that proprietary content that's written by um staff ebsco staff members who are assigned specifically to novelist they also contract with um people in the profession who are known as uh for their readers advisory um specialization under spotlight one of the things that I really really like is um they have information about different genres and they will for for um they list more genres than you would ever think existed um for example for thrillers and suspense you get uh page that has all kinds of information about this genre why do people read it um who are some of the most uh well known authors in this genre what are some recommended titles in this genre so um that can be really useful um let me go ahead now let's try um there's just one thing I'm going to show you in novelist k8 uh as you can see it looks very similar to um the uh regular novelist and I just want to point out here it defaults to ages nine through 12 I'm going to go ahead and go to teen this is one of those things that I just think is um a neat characteristic for example under here it says four fans of you click on that and here they have even like television like musical groups and television series and they say if you have student if you have uh you know kids who like One Direction these might be books they'd like or if you like kids who like um games game of thrones um here are books that we'd recommend for them so that's a whole different way of doing readers advisory so um that's what I like about this database okay hopefully that's the uh database that I will spend the most time on um biography reference center is the other biography database that we have access to um it has a close to half a million uh let's see a half a million full text biographies uh it's got content from biography today and biography magazine uh there's several ways you can find content you can do a basic search by um the name of a person an occupation a country or nationality they have a nice carousel with images of people whose biographies they're featuring so you can click on one of those images to get a biography I'm going to go ahead and just click on Steve Jobs image just to get you to a basic record this is what they call their biography landing page and each individual will have one it's got some basic information about the person down below you'll see a section on detailed biographies so I can go ahead and um access the full text for one of these biographical articles in this case it's nice and lengthy and then also there will be a section with more concise biographies these would be maybe biographical entries in a biographical uh reference book what you might expect just a you know half a page or something okay going back I want to do a quick search to show you how the search works I did a search on Patrick Stewart in this case um if I clicked on this record I would get to the biography landing page which is the type of page we landed on with Steve Jobs over at the left I have some other options however again I could go to those detailed biographies listing the concise biographies listing I also have um a link that says interviews and you'll see now I've got um biographical articles from a number of different magazines and journals that I could access about Patrick Stewart so that is some supplemental material I do want to point out the advanced search screen this is a screen where you can kind of build a search to to describe the type of person you're interested in without necessarily knowing the name of the person so I could say um I want I want Canadian Canadian female authors and I swear swear some of these uh limiters are wrapping differently and showing up in different spots than they were upstairs but okay what did I do wrong female I'm having trouble seeing so I can't even see if I'm spelling things incorrectly okay female Canadian author so now I've got a list of 77 um female Canadian authors so that's the way you can use that moving along um another one of my favorite databases in the new package is points of view reference center um I think it would be of interest to anybody but realistically it's probably going to be used most by students upper middle school and high school um it's going to be a great resource for students who need to uh study a controversial topic um understand both sides of the issue write a persuasive essay participate in debates etc um there's several ways you can search content here you can type in a search term they have a carousel where they list controversial topics that are in the news and they also let you browse by category so I'm going to go ahead and go down to um crime and punishment and capital punishment there are over 370 topics topic areas covered by points of view and for each topic area you can expect to get at least an overview essay which is written specifically for this database and it's going to give you background information on the issue um and what what the history is uh so you'll have a the background article over to the right then you'll have a link you'll have a point article and a counterpoint article so one will um so these articles or essays will take uh different sides of the issue and lay out the argument for or against a particular topic and again these are written specifically for the uh this database there's also something called um guide to critical analysis uh for each topic and again it's going to kind of walk students through how to analyze and think about the issue uh one of the things that I think is interesting is they give the difference between facts and opinions so they'll make a factual statement and an opinion statement and kind of show how why one's opinion one's fact and these are tied to the issues finally for any particular issue um if you look over on the left uh in addition to the content that's written specifically for points of view you also have magazines newspapers books biographies etc so I'm going to go ahead and just click on magazines here and now I will get um magazine articles on capital punishment um that would also help support a student writing uh persuasive essay or preparing uh to debate a particular issue so not only is there unique content in this database it's a great way to get your students seeing all sides of an issue um getting backup support material for them so again I think this would be really useful for schools switching gears again we have um some what they call their reference centers so I'm going to start with the legal information reference center this is obviously not going to take the place of a patron needing to talk to a lawyer but at least it'll give them background information of what some of the legal issues are that they may be dealing with and ways to think about it so there are several ways to find information you can do a search you can browse by category or you can browse popular sources and you can see here that under the popular sources carousel they highlight these no low guides um this is not an this is not a comprehensive uh display of sources included but these are some that they are highlighting and if a page and clicks on one of these titles they'll get into a pdf version of the full book I'm going to go ahead and just do a quick search for overtime so anyone who has employees might be interested in this issue at some point so you can see that the results come from the different um full text guides and handbooks employers legal handbook essential guide to federal employment laws etc leave and time off so this is one way to get into the full text content you can also browse by categories and drill down like I said under family affairs and divorce for instance you've got some subcategories picking parenting and you've got several guides to IEP so again parents who have students who have IEPs in the school system might be interested in these guides again as you open them up Alanis frowning IEP is individual education program or or something like that so um you've got uh the pdf version of the uh document here uh you can scroll through the chapters on the left in order to access the whole thing so um one individualized education program um individualized to that child yes okay so that is the legal information reference center we also have the small business reference center which is something that I think would be really easy for public libraries to promote um in their community for community development purposes um again it's got the option for searching the option to browse categories or browse popular sources and again um the popular sources that they highlight are those no low uh guides the full text that are available um can I throw in one thing I'm sorry before we get too much further on the legal information center there's also many many legal forms from all the states so if your patrons are looking for legal forms that that could be a source also okay um again I'll give you examples of how you can search this you might do a search for crowd uh crowdfunding and one thing I didn't mention with the legal um most of the full text content in the legal reference center comes from full text publications there are a few magazines that are included full text but not many small business center is different there are lots of full text publications and guides like those no low guides but there are also a number of um I think over 500 full text magazines and journals that are represented and so when I do this search for crowdfunding you can see some of the publications that the articles come from food manufacture I'm sorry my eyes entrepreneurship I can't read the small starting and building and on starting you know business mag you know organ business magazine business week etc so you can find lots of um trade publications business magazines etc um under the uh browse by category um I would encourage all of you to explore these categories I'm going to go ahead and go to industry information by small business type um you can go to for something like bakeries and then you have an option you can search for articles and magazines and journals or you can search for industry information so if you've got someone who is wanting to start a business you can see how this would be really useful here's a an industry profile obviously this is something that business students in a college or university class might find interesting also so you've got all more information than you ever want to know about the business of bakeries and market overview etc so hopefully that gives you a sense of what you can find in this database um it also does include a number of videos from the harvard business school so um you know if you've got people who want to do that sort of sort of professional development um watching uh lectures on things like um marketing or um or I can't think sorry um finally um I want to go into my last one um health health sorry um consumer health reference center um this is obviously aimed at uh not medical professionals but your everyday average person who maybe has been diagnosed with a particular condition who who wants to be proactive about their health or understand a diagnosis um on this main screen you'll see these different categories basically represent different types of publications that are included so evidence-based reports back sheets and pamphlets news and magazines alternative sources so it not only standard medical health publications but also more alternative and complementary um procedures and and um publications are included as well these categories you will see them represented in result lists in the form of uh tabs that patron that um users can click through so I'm going to go ahead and do a search I can remember what my search was I lost my hand out because that information on it here we go um so I'm going to go ahead and do COPD and do a search and you'll see it looks like I got one result but basically what it means is I got one result that is in the category of evidence-based reports now you'll see tabs representing all those different source types so I can find encyclopedia articles on COPD reference books um fact sheets news magazines etc and these are all uh I believe all of these are full text so you can find lots of different types of information um you can even find information on what sorts of uh drugs might be uh prescribed to someone who has COPD so um other ways you can find information in this database uh you've got a quick find over to the right that lets you search an alphabetical list of diseases conditions injuries etc so just picking uh letter at random you can see um a list that you can browse through if you don't remember how to spell it but you know what the word starts with right um you've also got uh search by topic area so I could for instance say okay I'm interested in children's health it will show me subtopics under children's health so I could perhaps say teenagers age 11 through 16 if I check that and then I do a search up here my search is going to be limited to that subcategory so I could say something like depression and my results will uh be uh focused on that subcategory finally at the bottom they do highlight a few uh sort of popular sources uh that they include content from so for example men's fitness magazine um they give you I I'm not sure I think this is probably uh content from the current issue you can also search within that publication I imagine this is mainly going to be of interest to people who um just kind of want to browse periodically and see what the latest in that magazine is so here's a way that you can do a search for articles about crossfit that occurred in men's fitness so um that's uh my overview of the databases and so I think Alana's got two more things that she's going to talk about briefly I know time is short so I will make this quick that's okay um just so everyone know we are at 11 o'clock but we did start about five minutes after um we'll go as long as it takes for them to finish up and we get a few questions here as well um so if you do need to leave because you your hour a lot if this is done that's fine we're recording you can always watch it later and catch up on the bit you might have missed at the end I'll still try to make it short the last two databases I want to mention are more of what I like to think of interfaces as opposed to data databases that is the explorer that you'll see highlighted here across the top and that's the explorer for what they epsom epsco refers to as public libraries and explorer down here the primary school version of explorer I'm going to start with the explorer primary schools and what this is it is an interface that actually brings content together from multiple resources so in this explorer primary source you will have access to the primary search database that I showed you earlier um that funk and waggles new new world and psychopedias in here um again the american heritage children's dictionary and you also will be searching across biography re uh biography reference center that susan showed you earlier um what I really like about these interfaces however is the fact that they as you can see are much more colorful looking and they let students browse which I think can also be helpful you can see here we have um these main categories I'm going to go ahead and jump into the animal category and you can see here it's broken down alphabetical um let's go ahead and take a look at alligator and you can see here at the top the screen the first thing it gives me when I'm in the explorer interfaces or what they call these topic overviews this is from the Salem press primary encyclopedia so you can see here it gives me just you know a lot of basic information on elevators and I do want to point out by default both explorer interfaces will limit your search results to full text so that way if you have that you know elementary kids in here doing searching they are going to get those full text results right away you can see there are other reference books that are coming up here magazines there's plastic news that made the cover story so well I'm glad you started this is that was actually one of our questions that you've already answered so I wanted to know about explorer because they were seeing it yes screen and the question was is it a federated search engine that allows you to search multiple databases yes yes and then and I don't even sure if it does this if so are there limiters to the number of databases you can search can you even control that actually they're preset by okay so it's a preset okay actually we have and preset by ebsco it's preset by ebsco it's not preset I mean we have we have a list of databases that we that they give us that we can include in it and then we can choose from those which ones we want in case you can't pick and choose I don't want to search these databases and we have included everything yeah so okay cool we we've given you everything that ebsco allows us yes and on our help pages we I'm assuming we spell out which database yes it does so I'm gonna go ahead and jump back to the page again and I do want to show you then this is the explorer the public library edition is if ebsco calls it you can see the graphics are a little more adult looking I like to search them I do too now this database when you search explorer you are searching across the master file complete that I showed you earlier you are also searching across primary search there's also biography reference center consumer health complete legal information reference center and again this is going to have those topical overviews that I just showed you in that my search for elevators so I'm going to go ahead and browse let's go ahead and go to let's look at some of the current events and I'm going to Amazon deforestation I can't see it there we go good thing I'm done talking almost so again you can see here you know we have that topic overview again a variety of different resources again being limited to full text and you can see here again we have academic journals magazine books news etc so the advanced search screen here you can see there are some limiters that do apply specifically to some of the different databases but I will let you explore that on your own some more when you have time it is Susan mentioned if you click on the little question marks here it will tell you everything that's included in those two explorer interfaces so I think that's all we want to cover and show on the databases I will turn it back over to Deborah and there were a couple at least a couple questions. The other question which is specific to database but I think might apply to other ones too someone says our library currently subscribes to consumerreports.org via EBSCO since master file complete includes consumer reports magazines can I cancel my standalone subscription to consumerreports.org or is the content between the two products unique enough that I should maintain my standalone subscription I think we'd had that question before and the answer was that the consumerreports.org subscription includes a lot of additional content more than what's in it includes more than just the online version of the print publication so again it's going to be a judgment column the part of the library but it's not there is more in the subscription database than just the full text magazine articles so it might be something where you'd have to look and see what it says is included what yours has figure out what people might be trying to use and see if you could save somebody cancelling yours now and going with this one instead kind of like what you do with any database yeah it's not a one-to-one sort of situation okay that's another question that we actually have anyone does have any questions last minute you want to get in in the last few minutes we're here type it in quick otherwise of course you could ask him contact you guys at any time yes contact us at any time and as we said here later this morning or within the next couple hours we will be sending out the email that gives you the link to this preview page and the password so you can get in and play with the databases yourself okay are we done all right we just have some thank yous coming in it looks like somebody else had any urgent questions at the moment all right thank you very much guys I'll take the mouse um thank you very much Alana Susan and Deborah for taking us through this I've been you know let's see it's been a busy time in the last few months or so figuring this out maybe a stressful time for people here figuring out what works what's not what's in there um so yeah people are very excited to try it out thank you very informative very informative so yeah um look for that chess stuff so that you guys can uh check it out yourself and start playing with what's in there all right so that will wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live um it's being recorded so um also maybe later today the recording will be available so if you want to watch it again you need to share it with a colleague who wasn't able to join us this morning you'll be able to do that send the um recording off to people um the recording will be available here on our website as they always are under our archived Encompass Live sessions which is right below our upcoming sessions so it'll be added here and I will send an email out to everyone letting you know and announce it on our mailing list so thank you very much for attending everyone um I hope you join us next week when our topic is cataloging a very popular topic always on Encompass Live whenever we have anything cataloging related um metadata manipulations is the title using mark edit and open refine to enhance technical services workflows something I know absolutely nothing about uh not being a cataloger at all Debra might understand this top the title um the Emily Nimsacant who up until last week was the cataloging librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission she is now as of Monday I just see here the head of cataloging and resource management at the Schmidt Law Library at University of Nebraska Lincoln so elsewhere in town she will be on the show with us talking about these cool cataloging things that you can use to help um your workflow so uh definitely sign up for that join us for our next week's show um this mouse is a little jumpy you need a new battery all right so um also if you are a big Facebook user there we go um Encompass Live is also on Facebook go ahead and like us there you'll see announcements of when new shows are coming when um recordings are available here as you can see our top um thing I just posted up this morning reminder to log in on the fly for today's show so if you are big on Facebook definitely go ahead and like us over there to keep up with what you're doing what we're doing other than that that will wrap it up for this morning thank you very much and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live bye bye


It's not the wrong house, it's not the wrong house, I'm sorry.


So, good evening, everyone, and welcome. For those of you whom I've not yet met, I'm Pat Parazzini, Director of Alumni Engagement, Regional Chapter Development for Fairfield University, and I am so thrilled to be able to bring this event to you via Zoom. In my position here at the university, I have the pleasure of working with alumni from across the country, coordinating with chapter leaders, and volunteers to host events that keep alumni and parents connected to and engaged with Fairfield. We have nine regional chapters from Boston to Washington, D.C. alphabetically, and from Boston to San Francisco geographically. So, isn't this the perfect day to host this event? It's a snowy evening here in New England, and we have the ability to travel from the comfort of our homes. A couple of reminders, if you would, please make sure your audio capabilities are turned off, and if you should have any questions during the presentation, feel free to use the chat function, and our guest docent will answer all questions at the end of the presentation. So, grab your bug of hot cocoa, get comfortable, and enjoy.  It was the brainchild of the Fairfield-Westchester County's alumni chapter, our local chapter, and specifically, chapter leader Tom Clements, class of 2009. Tom was a student athlete during his time at Fairfield, a member of the men's soccer team, and has been the communications chair for the chapter since 2018. So, I'd like to pass the baton to Tom to introduce our docent for this virtual tour. Tom, take it away. Thanks very much, Pat. Well, good evening, everybody, and thank you for taking the time to join us for this special tour of several historic New England locations. I'd like to introduce you to our speaker this evening, Melinda Huff. Melinda serves as the museum operations manager at Historic New England and oversees the organization's day-to-day museum and tour operations. With over 25 years in the museum field, she's held curatorial and management positions at Harvard University Art Museums to replace Historic House and Garden in Washington, D.C. and Winterthur Museum in Delaware. Melinda's been with Historic New England for 13 years collectively, serving as collections manager from 1995 to 2000 and in her present role since 2012. She holds an MA in art history from Tufts University and a BA from the University of Delaware. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with her husband, 10-year-old son, and dog, Duke. So without further ado, take it away, Melinda. Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. Can everybody hear me? Yeah? Great. Thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you tonight. It's a pleasure to be able to bring history and beauty into your lives in a cold and snowy night. I assume that you've signed up for this session because you have an interest or affinity in the history of New England, its buildings, its landscapes, its people, and its objects. And so for that, too, I thank you. Our work at Historic New England wouldn't be possible without the interest and support of people who share our collective interests. And while I'm virtually here with you tonight, I know we'll be able to share all of these things in person again soon. Historic New England was founded as SBNEA, wait for this long, mouthful society for the preservation of New England antiquities in 1910. And our mission is to share our home's open space collection and stories from the past through today. We are the oldest and largest regional heritage organization in the nation. While I'm going to highlight several of our museum properties tonight, I did want to give you a sense of the work we do as an organization with a glimpse at our five program areas. So the first is homes, farms, and landscapes. And that's what mainly I'm going to be talking to you about tonight. We have 37 historic site attractions in five New England states, nothing yet in Vermont. So if anybody knows of a great house with a great endowment, we'd love to talk to you with great collections. We have house museums and farms and 1284 acres of farmland, fields, forests, and garden. We do house tours, public and private, public programs, function rentals, land conservation and open space for the enjoyment of all. And of course we are a membership organization and I'll put the URL up at the end if anybody's interested in joining us as a member. We'd love to have you as a member or a visitor at our sites or at a public program. We also have an arm of community engagement and leadership. These are partners that partnerships that are designed to capture history as it happens. So on your screen here you see on the left hand side, we've just recently in the past couple of years finished up a project on the history of the hay market market in downtown Boston. We've worked on a project recently on immigration in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and then we also have a strong internship and volunteer program that you can see on the right. We collect artifacts, archives, archival material and stories. So we have over 123,000 household objects in our collection and over 1.5 million archival documents that's photographs, you know, manuscripts, architectural plans and drawings. They capture life in the region from the 17th century to today. We have a vibrant school and youth program, programs to go in the classroom, home school programs, summer camps and lots of partnerships with local schools. Unfortunately we haven't seen many kids on our site recently but we hope that will change soon. Unfortunately if any of you own a historic house, you may be familiar with the process of thinking about how to protect the features, the historic features of your historic home. And we have an easement program. It's one of the only ones of its kind in the country and our easement program helps homeowners identify features like even a stone wall or a staircase, a fireplace that might need to be protected from further alterations or neglect and the easement does not prevent future sales leases or estate planning but it does help you to protect important historic features in your home.  So in addition to caring for our own buildings, using best practices, we provide outreach to homeowners through historic homeowner consulting, preservation intervention strategy. We have a whole list of white papers on our website so if you're looking for information about replacing windows or working on certain aspects of your home, please check out our website section on the white papers. So with that I just wanted to give you a little bit of background of what Historic New England does, who we are in addition to Operating Historic House Museums. Now I mentioned that I am the Museum Operations Manager, which means I oversee the day-to-day management at all 37 sites and that means my job is to make sure that you have an excellent tour when you come to our site but also that you can find the restroom, that your ticketing process is smooth and so the big picture from soup to nuts, when you step on our property we want you to have a great time and enjoy your experience. So let's start the tour. I'm going to go through a handful of properties today. Not all 37, we'd be here all night but it's some of my favorites actually and I'm trying to pick geographic, some geographic variety, date variety and also the type of property that might be interesting for you all to visit. Now this is our only Connecticut property, Rosen Cottage is in the quiet corner in Woodstock, Connecticut, built in 1846 in the Gothic Revival style and you can see it down, the house itself is in kind of the lower portion of the center of the slide. It was built, it's the summer home of silk merchant Henry Chandler Bowen and his wife Lucy Tappen and the entire complex with a boxwood part hair garden and ice house, the garden house and carriage barn reflects the principles of writer and designer Andrew Jackson Downing who was kind of the Martha Stewart of his day. He stressed practicality along with the picturesque and offered detailed instructions on room function, sanitation and landscaping. A house like Rosen Cottage was a conscious effort to convey status and especially with the Gothic Revival, I think looks like a church, the morality of the people who lived inside. And here's a facade view. You might notice the color of the house, that might be the first thing that stands out for you. It's known locally as just as the pink house and its unorthodox color has been a distinguishing character since the home's completion. In 1883, the New York Times called the color, quote, a brilliant crushed strawberry. Historic New England's paint analysis determined the house has been 13 different colors, all of them a shade of pink since it was built in 1846. The current color is called coral bronze and it is the color of the house was painted in the 1880s. So we've chosen coral bronze to be consistent with the interior of the cottage, which I'm going to show you in a minute, which reflects the redecoration of the house in the 1880s. By the way, the Bowens had 10 children. So beginning in 1870, the largest Fourth of July celebrations in the United States were held at Rosen Cottage. Four United States presidents visited Bowen's summer home as his guest and speakers for these celebrations. Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, and William McKinley, and other prominent visitors included nearby residents Henry Ward Beecher, Julia Ward Howe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The parlors at Rosen Cottage were used for formal entertainments and informal family gatherings and included cousin parties, dinner parties, tea parties. As you can see here, the house is adorned with gothic revival furniture, with trefoil arches, stained glass. So you kind of get the idea of the themes that they're going for. Design elements that you might find in a gothic church. The 1880s wall coverings in the house, in the public spaces, are type known as Lincrusta, and it was introduced by Frederick Walton in England in 1877. So Lincrusta, it's wallpaper, but it's actually has a three dimensional quality. It's produced by pressing a mixture of wood pulp and linseed oil into fabric or paper backing to create a raised texture. So it's quite luxurious and would have been luxurious in its day. Now over time, this has been a major conservation project for us to get these wallpapers and keep them in good shape, because over time the wood pulp degrades the finishes dull. And this is, Rosen Cottage is one of the only places in the world where you can see this paper intact in its original setting as it was originally hung. The Parterre gardens at Rosen Cottage are an integral part of the house as well in keeping with Downing's ideas of the relationship of landscape and the architecture. Downing and others believe that just the site of a properly landscaped gardens could elevate public taste and morals. A Parterre garden, he believes, should have irregular curving beds. Edges should be marked distinctly with boxwood, which you can see there. Those boxes are laid out in boxwood. The Parterres are laid out in boxwood. And currently, the Parterre garden contains 21 flower beds with more than 4,000 annuals that are planted every year. And this looks like it's at the end of the summer, so you can't quite see the entire pop of color that exists. One of my favorite spaces at Historic New England is this space at Rosen Cottage. This is a bowling alley built in 1846. It's certainly not the first of its kind in the country, but it's the oldest one that remains. Our alley is a little over 53 feet long, 10 feet shorter than today's standard bowling alley. And it was a 10-pin bowling alley, which was very popular in the 1840s. And it replaced nine-pin bowling in 1841, which was banned in Connecticut because of its association with gambling and drinking. Mr. Bowen of Rosen Cottage was a strict teetotaler and did not abide gambling or smoking in his house. So it became nine-pin. The 10-pin replaced nine-pin bowling. That's Yankee ingenuity, I think. They just added another pin to get around the law. So we're going to leave Rosen Cottage now, and we're going to go to Casey Farm. So that's southeast of the quiet corner of Connecticut. And you might be familiar with Casey Farm or Sounders Town and Jamestown, Rhode Island, because they're on the way to Newport. And I put this property in our slideshow not for its value as a historic home visit, but for its value as a visit of the farm itself as a landscape and the historic farm buildings. The main house was built around 1750. But in fact, the property was owned by the Casey family from 1702. So it's more than 300 acres. It stretches from Narragansett Bay. And there are 10 miles of stone walls, many of which are five feet high. And they divide the field areas of Casey Farm. So you imagine all of this maintenance. It's an incredible maintenance job just to keep the stone walls intact every year. It's a working organic farm. And we host the coastal growers market every Saturday in from May to October. There's also a community supported agriculture program with over 200 families as its members. And there are annual seedling and plant sales. So if you're ever on your way to Newport on a Saturday, I highly recommend stopping in at Casey Farms. There are trails you can hike. And it's quite a peaceful and different experience from touring our houses. This is a mentioned our school program. And I wanted to give a big shout out to our project program that's huge in Rhode Island. Students learn about bird lifecycle of the endangered Dominique chicken breed, which is raised at the farm. And farm educator goes into the classroom, takes a clutch of eggs. Three weeks later, the eggs hatch in the classroom. The eggs go back to Casey Farm. And then the students go and visit their chickens on site a few weeks after that. So it's a great way for students to learn about free range chicken and farming on one of the oldest farms in Rhode Island. We do a wonderful farm to table fundraiser there every year. And we have events, weddings, and the like that you could rent the site for. And in some ways, very little has changed over the centuries at Casey Farm. Indigenous people were drawn to this fertile strip between the Bay and River because of the abundant food source. The same 300 acres that were surveyed in 1652 for the Casey family are the same farmer's work today. It's really an amazing preservation story, land preservation story. Continuity was maintained by eight generations of ownership of the one family from 1702 until historic New England acquired the property in 1955. Moving a little farther north, we have the Eustis estate, which is built in 1878. It's in Milton, Massachusetts. So Metro Boston area of Massachusetts. It is our most newly acquired property in the aesthetic style. Not what's known as this aesthetic style. It's designed by renowned Boston architect William Ralph Everson. It sits on 80 acres of picturesque landscape at the base of the Blue Hills. And in fact, the adjacent Blue Hills reservation was once part of the Eustis estate as well. It's full of stunning intact architectural design and details, which I'm going to show you in a minute. And it's a historic site unlike any other in the greater Boston area. I mentioned it was occupied by the Eustis family, but it was occupied by the family from the time it was constructed until the time we acquired the property. And I think we acquired it in 2013. And we opened it to the public in 2015. So we took about two years to get the house ready. The Eustis family had occupied the house up until that time. They only really painted the walls. They did very little. So what we were able to do in terms of paint analysis and research, we were able to uncover all these amazing finishes and replicate all these amazing finishes that you see. I'll talk about them in a minute. But this is the living halls. So it was the first impressions visitors had of this young couple's home. And this was their starter home. This was built for WEC Eustis and his wife, Edith. They had two twin boys and a daughter, Mary. And this was their starter and final home, I have to say. But guests would enter through the vestibule. That's the upper picture with the stained glass, where they would encounter a pair of dramatic stained glass windows, colorful yet obscuring the view into the hall behind. And once inside the hall, visitors were impressed by this imposing fireplace. So that's the bottom slide. It always is amazing to me. I have to go up and touch it every time. But this is molded terracotta on the bottom part of the fireplace. And it's set behind an arch that's covered in gold leaf. So we know that was the treatment, the paint treatment that the Eustises had. The richly carved staircase, which you can see in the slide, stores three stories up. So if you were standing at the base of the staircase and you looked up, it went up all three stories. Opposite the front doors, plants from the estate greenhouse would have thrived in the large windows. Oh, sorry, definitely not the Eustis estate. OK. The dining room was restored to its 1870s decorative scheme. Gold paint applied to textured walls so they would take a sand mixture for the wall color and mix it into the paint and then cover it over with a gold kind of mica material. It really would make, you can imagine, just a glittering fact with the gas light that was in the gas chandelier that's over the dining room table. And the ceiling also had a metallic finish of mica in it as well. So it really must have been grand to sit in an evening entertainment in the Eustis estate dining room. Unlike many of our properties that Eustis estate, we got a handful of furnishings. So we were able to supplement those furnishings with period pieces. And I'll talk about that in a minute, how we were managing that as a museum. Just lastly, the tiles for those ceramic nerds in the audience. The tiles on the dining room fireplace were produced by Jay and J.G. Low Company of Chelsea. They're a famous kind of arts and crafts or aesthetic style ceramic company in Chelsea, Massachusetts. And of course, one of everybody's favorite space in the house is the service area. We like to think of it as our own little Downton Abbey here. The service area with its coal fire range and water heater to the right of it was equipped with it was designed for practicality and to be carefully hidden from public view. So the Eustis visitors never got to see these areas. But if you are a visitor, you do get to see it. You also see the call bell system and the speaker system in the slide below. So our approach at the Eustis estate has been one of be our guest. So I mentioned we put in reproduction furnishings in much of the house. You can go to the house and sit on the furniture. Well, in non-COVID times, let's say that. We've had to make some changes in the last several, the last year. But you can go to the property, sit on some of the furnishings, and really take your time through by using our web app. And you can zoom in on all the furnishings in the room. It gives you the history of the site. And you can even go to it from the comfort of your own home at Eustis.estate. So that was really for us as an organization, a seminal moment when we said, we're not going to make people wear shoe covers and say, don't touch things. We want people to enjoy, sit down. You can go to the library, pull books off the shelf and read them. You can spend the whole day there, in fact. And it's been very popular. So now we're moving on to the Gropius House. Very different aesthetic. So I hope I always run into people who say, oh, modern architecture isn't my thing. And I say, come for a tour of the Gropius House. We'll change your mind or at least get you to appreciate the Gropius House and modern architecture. Built in 1938, it's located in Lincoln, Massachusetts. It's the second most visited property that we own, by the way. So people come from all around the world to visit. They take a true trip to Pilgrimage to see the Gropius House. It's the home of architect Walter Gropius and built for his family when he and his wife, Issa, and his daughter, Adi, moved to the United States from Germany. Walter Gropius was the founder of the German design school known as the Bauhaus and was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. And he came to be the head of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, also called the GSD for short. The house is modest in scale. People are always interested that it seems so small when they go inside. But it was a family of three. It was the home of a family of three. And keeping with the Bauhaus philosophy, every aspect of the house and the landscape was planned for maximum efficiency and simplicity. Gropius House combined traditional elements of New England architecture. So there's batten wood panels or batten wood boarding on the outside of the house. Brick and fieldstone is part of the patio system. But there is also the use of innovative materials like glass block, acoustical plaster, chrome banisters, and the latest technology and fixtures. And one of the things visitors like the most is when they walk in, it feels like the Gropius is just walked out of the house. It's filled with families' possessions that include an important furniture collection designed by Marcel Breuer. And I'll show you a few of those pieces. Here's Walter Gropius in about 1960 in a photograph of him on the stair hall. Chrome banister, cork floors, kind of interesting use. And glass block. You can see the glass block from the inside. It provides light, but it also provides privacy as well. And an interesting kind of component we talked about combining traditional elements of New England architecture. This is a center hall plan. It's just not the same center hall plan that you would find in a, it's not the same center hall staircase that you'd find in a colonial house, but still a center hall staircase. One of my favorite rooms in the whole of historic New England is this tiny, tiny office, although if I had it today and I had to work next to my husband during the Zoom culture, I think I might, you know, I don't think it might, I don't think it would be my favorite room anymore, but this is a Marcel Breuer designed desk. It was designed for Issa and Walter Gropius. It was a tandem decks desk and it was specifically designed to be equitably divided for Issa and Walter Gropius. So I don't know if you can see that there's up in the kind of left hand corner by the curtains. There's a hint of the spiral staircase on the outside and I'm just gonna go back. So the spiral staircase on the outside of the house that you see there leads up to Walter Gropius's 13 year old daughter's room, Ati. Ati had her own entrance to her room, which was very liberating. Must have been for a 13 year old teenager, but you do notice that he could see everything, they could see everything from the outside of the house as she would enter from, and they could see from their office. And you can see all these little artifacts of the Gropius's life, just as we live with our artifacts on our desk today. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute, whoops. This is the living room. So the living room has an open plan and very large windows. Again, think about how revolutionary this must have been to use a huge plate glass window in a house in 1938, really groundbreaking in a lot of ways. And it really invited nature in. Most of the furniture, by the way in this room is Marcel Breuer furniture designed by him. And as I mentioned at the Eustis estate, there are certain areas where guests can make themselves at home. But so here at Gropius house too, you can see our visitor enjoying sitting on Walter Gropius's reproduction lounge. This is not actually his chair, but you can source this furniture today. And here's a visitor, they're Gropius groupies who come from all over the world to see his home and they can't believe they're actually sitting in his living room, lots of Instagram pages from Gropius's living room. So the dining room is also an open space. And here's the dining room. It's right off the living room, but it can be made more private by using the curtains that you can see kind of on the edge of the photographs. Gropius introduced theatrical and dramatic lighting over the table. Again, things that we take a little bit more for granted because we have lots of options for our lighting today, but on the picture on the right, that pinprick light was not something you could commercially buy for a home setting that was more for an industrial use. And it was very innovative Gropius. It would have been very evocative to have your friends sitting around that table and being picked out in the light. And in fact, Walter Gropius entertained a lot and a lot of people that a lot of famous artists, musicians, intellectuals in his time. And then the kitchen, the kitchen is a small but functional space here, access through a door in the dining room, not a huge kitchen with the center island, very functional again. And one of the great things about Gropius house is we know exactly with absolute certainty where every item was supposed to be right down to those hanging pot holders above the stove because the Gropius's daughter, Adi, who recently two or three years ago now has passed away, but she's been with us on the journey of the Gropius house since we acquired it in 1982. And she was 13 when she moved in the house. She has photographs, she shared all of her knowledge with us and helped us really recreate the look down to all of the dish towels that the family had, which is really amazing that we've had from that relationship with her and still continue with her daughter, Adi's daughter today. Okay, we're moving north, North Shore of Massachusetts, Blaster, Boe Port. I put 1907 as a date, but that's really when the house starts to become itself. It spans over a period of almost 30 years until its owner, Henry Davis Sleeper, dies in 1934. This is actually our most highly visited property. And Sleeper was an interior designer. He was a friend of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Celia Boe, A.Pia Andrew. It sits on Eastern Point, which is an exclusive neighborhood of Gloucester, overlooking Gloucester Harbor. And this picture really doesn't give it justice, but it is a beautiful estate and it's even more beautiful to be able to sit on the terrace at Boe Port and sit and look out over Gloucester Harbor. One of the great things about Boe Port is that Sleeper as an interior designer is putting together these objects in a way that is stunning using light and color and arrangement and really making the room come together. And one of the greatest honors I have as one of the things I do every year is I help to open the house because there's lots of dusting and cobwebs and everything that we have to clear away to get the house ready to be open. But I get to dust all the objects in this room every year and I love doing it because you can pick the objects up. If you as a visitor can't necessarily do this, but if we're cleaning the objects, you can. And one of Sleeper's tenants was an object doesn't have to be perfect. So some of these objects have cracks or chips in them, but he didn't care about that. He wanted the pieces to come together in an arrangement for you to see the overall effect. So this is one of five dining rooms in the house. He entertained a lot and it would often match the menu to the dining room. This is the only room with white walls too in the house. I call your attention to the window which could be raised and lowered. So it would move down into the sash and you would be sitting on top of Gloucester Harbor while you're eating dinner. Now what is fascinating that we've discovered in the last year in doing some work that this window was installed around 1917 or 1918, it coalesces with the interest in ventilation with the Spanish flu. So this is just something that, you know, this history repeats itself and is informing us with our interest in ventilation these days. We also recently held a fundraising dinner which was kind of fun in this room as well. We didn't use Henry Sleeper's china however. When you exit the golden step room, you go immediately into another dining room and this is now, no surprise, called the octagon room. Again, using shape and color and repeating pattern to produce a specific effect. The room is in octagon shape, the rug is octagon, the doorknob is octagon, the table is octagon. So really, again, the repetition of shape and color really does play out here in Sleeper's aesthetic as it does here in the amber glass display in the house. Another one of my very favorite rooms in the house is the belfry chamber which is reached by a staircase that's hidden staircase. Everybody loves hidden staircases, right? So one of the things Sleeper was very concerned about was having his wallpaper match up in just the right places. So not only did he pick out the wallpaper repeat to design to go with the aesthetic of the room but he hand cut all of these shapes and put them in the, adhered them in just the right space to get the effect he was looking for. Maybe the bird over here and the tree branch climbing up the wall. And then finally, the last room in this house is the golden, the China trade room. And when Sleeper died in 1934, we're lucky that the Helena Woolworth McCann, Woolworth of the Woolworth fortune, and her husband Charles purchased the property. They didn't change very much at all. They understood Sleeper's aesthetic. And I think it takes a really special person not to want to move stuff around in your house once you move in. They bought the house with all the furnishings and they only made minor changes to this China trade room, which included the spectacular wallpaper which is hand painted Chinese wallpaper from the 18th century made in Philadelphia for Patriot Robert Morris. And Morris never used the wallpaper. Sleeper discovered it in an attic in Marblehead and he installed it at Bo-Port. And so you can see his all kinds of scenes of the China trade, the Canton, the tea making and China dishes making at all the Hongs. It inspired a very similar room at Winniter Museum in Delaware and influential to wealthy collectors like Henry Francis Bonn. And then the last property I'm gonna talk about, oh, this is Bo-Port. This is the terrace. You can get married on the terrace if you'd like. So for it. The last property I'm gonna talk about is special to my heart. It's the Lyman Estate greenhouses begun being built in 1798. It is the oldest greenhouses intact in America. And you can imagine greenhouses are really kind of ephemeral because they're made out of glass, right? But we are so lucky at historic New England to have these intact greenhouses that are, it's a huge sprawling complex and you can go in and on a day like today or tomorrow or whenever the snow stops falling, you can go in, take in, be drenched by the smells, the sights of the greenhouse. There are historic plants like the grapes, they're what the name of the grapes are, green musket grapes that are growing. Those are historic plants. They're very popular table grape. We also grow black Hamburg grapes, which are a dark purple black variety that has a complex wine-like taste and they still produce fruit and we taste them every once in a while. And so there are three main greenhouses that you can visit. This is the Grape House and that was built in beginning in 1804. There's the Camellia House, which if you go into the Camellia House today, the Camellias are just getting ready to bloom, usher into bloom between late January and middle of March, this is their time. And this greenhouse was built about 1840 for the burgeoning Camellia interest that was being developed by horticulturalists in New England, including the Lyman family. The Lyman Estate Greenhouses has one of the few historic collections in fact, in existence today. And it's really just a true escape if you're ever looking for a way to get away in the middle of winter, it's like going to Florida, because it's humid, it's hot. Now, this year because of COVID, it's different because we're only allowing six people in the greenhouse at one time. But so maybe next year, we'll see us. And here is also our orchid house and house plants. We have a selection of plants for you to buy as well. And our staff horticulturalist, Lynn Ackerman is an expert, she's been there 31 years. It's not like going to Home Depot and picking out plants, you have somebody there who can really give you expert advice on the plant materials. And we also try to buy very unique things. It's really just a special experience to be able to enter a greenhouse that is just so old. And I wanted to end here with a few notes on how we've been able to deal in the COVID and how this has changed our operations. And really, I think in some ways made us a stronger organization. So we started out by opening our landscapes to the public first of course, because that's what we could do. But this has really prompted us to do more outdoor concerts and movies, partnership with our local theaters for outdoor performances, yoga, garden tours, arts and crafts festivals. We have a really high quality arts and crafts festival at Rosen Cottage in fact, in October if you're ever interested.  So, but anyway, they're really nice quality decorative and artisan products that we sell. And we were able to run those fairly well with limited capacity in the COVID but we really learned a lot from doing the programs in the time of COVID. We also were able to do summer camps and we are going to do summer camps again this year. So we learned how to do things safely and we'll do it again this year. We were able to open six houses in July. We also will be able hopefully to open many more houses beginning in June of this year. And our house tours were all done under strict COVID protocols, masks, social distancing, four to six people per tour pre book ticketing which we hadn't ever done before. So that was a challenge for us that we needed to, it was a problem, we knew we needed to solve it and this helped to accelerate how we were going to solve that problem for the future. We, you know, altered our tour route. So we're not going in the same way we came, not going out the same way we came in and we stepped up our cleaning and you can see the visitors in the bottom right of the Gropius house socially distanced and still able to take a tour. And then at the greenhouse, well, a greenhouse in a humid and not very much air circulation, at least for people, there's plenty for the plants, but we had to move all of our sales outside. And I have to say we had the record number of sales because people just wanted to have greenery and living things around them, I think. It was a really inspiring thing to see so many people coming out for our sales. Again, people still get married, recovered or no. And so we've pivoted to micro ceremonies, so 10 people or less, or depending on state restrictions, smaller wedding parties as restrictions allow. So we've still been able to continue on with some of these very essential elements for us as an organization, because if we weren't able to have the income from functions, that would be pretty devastating for us. And then my favorite outcome of the COVID is the Bow Port, bring your own picnics. And you can see these people, well, boy, they really came in style. You can rent the terrace at Bow Port for $250 and bring your friends in social distance and just really have a private, it's like you own Bow Port.  And so we are gonna continue that. That has definitely been a real upside. And then lastly, we were the recipients of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And we were able to create six virtual experiences. And I hope you can see my screen. I'm gonna click into a virtual tour of Rosen Cottage. Bear with me while it loads. And you can go on our website, just go on our main page and you can go in and enter the house and tour all the different rooms in the house. And it's a really, it's called Matterport Technology. And it's really, this was something we never would have been able to do on the timeline that we were able to do it given the COVID. So, whoops, they wanna... So I just wanted to throw that up there as an opportunity for you when we go away tonight for you to go to our website and have a look and maybe experience some of these houses and properties in even more depth. We also have some upcoming virtual programs. I know you all are doing your own virtual programs with Fairfield, but please have a look at our options on historicnewengland.org and we hope to see you soon. Melinda, thank you so much. I will share, I would say we recorded this, but I will also share historicnewengland.org with the group as well. So that was fantastic. Thank you very, very much. I think I said this to you. Our Boston chapter went up to Gropius House in May of 2016 before my coming over to alumni relations. So I look forward to the day when we can schedule another one of the tours at one of your landmark locations. So this was terrific. I'm gonna ask everybody to unmute themselves and give Melinda a round of applause, because that was great. Okay. Thank you. And if anybody has any, if you wanna shoot me an email or happy to answer any questions. I will share this last screen with them. That'd be great. Thank you. Thank you, Melinda. Thank you. This was great. Thank you. Very informative. Thank you so much. And before we leave today, so this is being recorded, so it's gonna be out on our university YouTube channel. But before we leave, I'd like to encourage you all to visit our website to learn about other online experiences throughout the university. It's www.fairfield.edu forward slash alumni events. Again, I wanna thank you all for attending. I so enjoy hearing from alumni and parents. So please keep in touch. I look forward to seeing you all again soon, hopefully in person. But until then, be well, stay safe. Thank you. And go Stags. Thank you all. Go Stags. Thank you. Love you. Be well. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Melinda, we had somebody from Greece. Just saw that. That's exciting. I can put that in my report.


You can now provide types for CSS variables. Byte for byte checks are now performed for service worker scripts imported by import scripts. And I've got details for two new origin trials that provide some neat new functionality. I'm Pete LaPage. Let's dive in and see what's new for developers in Chrome 78. CSS variables technically called custom properties are awesome. They let you define and use your own properties throughout your CSS. But custom properties are not much more than a simple search and replace. If you used a variable for a color, but assigned a URL as the value, the rule would just be silently discarded. With CSS properties and values API, you can define a type and a default fallback value for your custom properties. Registering a property is as easy as calling window.css.register property and providing the name of the property you're defining, the type of property it is, if it should inherit, and its initial value. Take a look at Sam's article on web.dev, linked in the description for complete details. Byte for byte checks are now performed for service worker scripts imported by import scripts. In the past, the only way to force an installed service worker to pick up changes to an imported script was to change either the imported scripts URL usually either by adding a semver value or a hash in the URL. Starting in Chrome 78, each time an update check is performed for the top-level service worker file, Chrome will also check whether or not the contents of any imported scripts have changed. If it has, it will trigger the full service worker update flow. This brings Chrome into conformance with the spec and matches what both Firefox and Safari do. Jeff has all the details in his post on developers.google.com, including some important things to know about how the HTTP cache impacts the update cycle. Origin Trials provide an opportunity for us to validate experimental features and APIs, and make it possible for you to provide feedback on their usability and effectiveness in broader deployments. Experimental features are typically only available behind a flag. But when we offer an Origin Trial for feature, you can register for that Origin Trial to enable the feature for all the users on your Origin. Opting into an Origin Trial allows you to build demos and prototypes that your beta test users can try for the duration of the trial without requiring them to flip any special flags in Chrome. There's more info on Origin Trials in the Origin Trial guide for web developers. An Origin Trial for the new native file system API has just started. The native file system API enables you to build powerful web apps that interact with files on the user's local device. After a user has granted a web app access, the API allows web apps to read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user's device. I'm really excited about all the new experiences this enables. No more having to upload or download any file that I want to work with. Check out my post about the native file system API for all the details including code, a demo, and how we're working to keep users safe. The SMS receiver API now available as an Origin Trial lets your web app receive specially formatted SMS messages for your app's origin. From this, you can programmatically obtain an OTP from an SMS message and verify a phone number for the user more easily. AG has a great post on web.dev with all the details and how you can sign up for the Origin Trial. Don't forget to tune in to the Chrome Dev Summit on November 11th and 12th. It'll be streaming live right here on the Chrome Developers YouTube channel. All the details including docs and specs are in the updates post linked in the description. Be sure to check out the latest Chrome DevTools video to learn what's new in DevTools and don't forget to subscribe. I'm Pete LaPage and as soon as Chrome 79 is released, we'll be right here to tell you what's new in Chrome.