Writing a comprehensive history of the Torch Lake era spanning epochs, Edward and Mary Kay McDuffie learned about another resource for their research: the Michigan eLibrary, or MeL for short.
The couple attended the first session of a two-part MeL course Saturday at Northwestern Michigan College's Osterlin Library, where they learned the ins and outs of accessing the extensive and librarian-vetted network of databases and information. The Torch Lake residents hope MeL will help them find additional information for their book, which covers from the Pleistocene epoch through the last glacier in the region and then up to 1945.
While MeL may be a bit too general for their targeted research, the McDuffies were pleased to learn about the service.
"We need of course the background data and I think that the MeL library will definitely help with that,” said Edward McDuffie. "She's the historian in the family and I'm a retired science and math teacher; my interest is in the Pleistocene geology.”
Michigan's best kept secret, MeL is a free service available to any Michigan resident merely by accessing the Internet and entering a driver's license number as a password.
"You can be hiking in the Himalayas and if you can get to an Internet café, you can access MeL with your driver's license number,” said Mary Beeker, a technical paraprofessional with the Osterlin Library who taught the course. "I was hiking in Peru and did it, it was pretty nice.”
The benefit of MeL is that a librarian has screened all the information and databases available. With so much information available online and no way of telling what is valid and what is not, MeL provides a professional eye to what is valid.
MeL puts online what librarians do every day: organize things.
"Libraries are all about classifying information,” noted Beeker. "We read over every piece of information that we collect and say, 'What is inside this and how do we make it accessible to our readers?'”
MeL is comprised of four main sections: catalog, Internet, databases and advanced search. The new catalog service — a clearinghouse to share books — is not available at either the Traverse Area District Library or the Osterlin Library, Beeker noted, so she did not go into it. Teaching her students how to navigate the Internet via MeL, Beeker guided her students through using search terms to best use the service and noted that clicking on a link in MeL opened a new browser window. She also advised attendees on the domain protocol and described the mission of the .org, .com, .edu and .net sites and how to navigate among sites.
".org sites can be really good info but they can also be an advocacy site that may distort information and may not give accurate data,” warned Beeker. "Be aware, there's a lot of different ways to search for information.”
MeL also provides access to myriad databases ranging from periodicals to magazines to newsletters to professional journals. Beeker handed out a list of the databases to students and also sifted through some to demonstrate how to find information.
"It is like the different sections of a library and what each is good for, like encyclopedias, reference and a dictionary,” said Beeker.
The Osterlin Library will host another free MeL course over two Saturdays, January 20 and 27, from 1-3 p.m. Call Beeker at 995-1015 to register or for more information.