Thing #19: Liveblogging a Couple of Databases

I've used EBSCO a lot, and found a few car things for people in the Auto Repair Centre, and I taught a lesson once on Canadian Newsstand QP Legaleze, so I should know my way around those (though I continue to have a hard time actually finding what I'm looking for in QP Legalese-- maybe I need to take a class before teaching another one!), but there are a bunch of databases I've never even looked into. So I'm going to look into a couple of new ones, and liveblog my experience here:

1. Encyclopedia of British Columbia:

I'm interested in finding out about the street trolley that used to run along Hastings Street, near my house, so I did a search for "Trolley". I got the "Street Railway" entry, which gives me a nice little article with a lot of links to other encyclopedia articles, and a photo of one of the President's Conference Committee cars which ran in Vancouver starting in 1939 (see photo above.)

That search reminded me that I want to find out more about the Kettle Valley Line, about which my daughter learned a song last year. So I'll do another search, and:

Hmm. "Kettle Valley Line" gets nothing, so I'll try just "Kettle Valley."
Bingo! An article on the Kettle Valley Railway. Informative, filled with links, includes links to other related websites, more photos, and a map of the Kettle Valley Line route. Nice!

Oh, and there's a helpful Subject Search feature that lists and links to long feature essays on topics like Architecture, Peoples of BC, and Physical Geography. Good to know.

Okay, on to another database...

2. Oxford Reference Online

This is mostly a literary/language reference, so I wanted to see if they had any citations for a folktale I heard at a workshop with Margaret Reid Macdonald last week. She told it as "The Great Smelly, Slobbery, Small-Tooth Dog," but then said she'd made up the "slobbery" part, so I just looked up "small tooth dog."

And there it was:

Small-Tooth Dog, the. A Derbyshire fairytale, an analogue to Beauty and the Beast, with the hero in the form of a dog; he recovers human form when the girl renames him ‘sweet-as-honeycomb’ (Addy, 1895: 1–4; Philip, 1992: 69–71).

Groovoid!