Overdrive, part 1

Overdrive is a resource that I've kind of avoided, and I think it's partly because I've gotten so many phone calls from patrons who are at their computer and expressing their frustration at not being able to use Overdrive, whether their device is incompatible, or they can't seem to download the console, or any other difficulty. This module forced me to try it, and I really enjoyed the product and messing around in it.

I started by looking for "Charles Dickens"; I was hoping there would be some great readers. At random, I clicked on A Christmas Carol, and Lo and Behold! there was Jim Dale as the reader. So I did another search on Jim Dale, and while it doesn't have the HP series, it does have all of the Starcatcher books. I'm not sure what the hold queue is like on these, but I was impressed to see the Starcatcher books available. There was also a 45 minutes documentary on Dickens, which I was glad to see! I pulled the plug on my tv about 3 years ago, but I do miss some of the infotainment from PBS and the History channel, so I'm glad there's another way to tune in to these episodes.

My second search was to target books on learning Korean. I typed in "korea*", which returned no hits; guess truncation is not an option, at least not with the asterisk symbol. A search on "Korea" resulted in 4 hits: 2 on the Korean War, 2 foreign language study books. The two language audiobooks were for travel, and only around 1 hour long each. I am less impressed with this. (Can't really learn a language from 1 hour of instruction!) I clicked on the subject link for Foreign Language Study and got 140 hits. Most are for European languages; I didn't check the run time for any of these.

A search on "foreign language study french" returned no hits (is it searching as a bound phrase? b/c "foreign language study" works and "french" works.) A search on simply "french" brought up (happy day!) lots of music audio for French ballet. I love French ballet and French opera music. I listened to an excerpt and a coworker came up behind me happily humming along to "Coppelia". That's me-- adding joy to the workroom.

For Mother's Day, I went down to Portland to see "Aida". The week before, I streamed some of the music at my computer while I was working. I really like streaming. I don't like the whole "add to cart", "place hold", "check out", etc.

I'm definitely going to get more patrons turned on to this resource. I still haven't actually checked out, downloaded, or any of the other stuff...