I love llamas! They are the first mammal that came to mind, so thought I would peruse the World Book Online to find out more. I'm pretty impressed with how each of the three components works of this resource works, providing good visual and user-friendly design based upon the target audience, Children grades K-5, 5-9 or 9th through Adulthood. As expected, the Kids online version was more limited, but did give me the basic information about their native habitat (South America) and how they are used by the people in the Andes Mountains. They make great pack animals for trekking up and down the steep terrain, but when pushed to carry too much weight, they will just lie down and refuse to go any further. Good for them!!! The Info Finder version, geared toward grades 5-9, provided a bit more information, appropriate to the age group. Both versions provided plenty of other links and opportunities for exploring further.
I picked a country that I knew nothing about and one which has always sounded musical to my ears...why not? Mozambique. I knew that it was located in eastern Africa, but beyond that all details were fuzzy. It was easy to access all kinds of information about Mozambique and learned quite a bit, including the fact that Portugese is the official language (which is also true of Portugal, Brazil and Angola). They have only been independent from Portugal since 1975 and that came after a 10 year struggle. The country is quite poor and heavily dependent on agriculture, but their capital city of Maputo has well over 1,000,000 people.
The ease of doing research has come a long way since the advent of online resources....very easy here to find information about citations and other research skills. I liked the fact that you were able to print selected sections of each article quite easily by just following a link.
Great resource for all ages! I am not sure that many of our patrons know these online resources are available, but they are so very easy to use.
