If you’re like me, you go on rabbit trails often. You’ll start by looking up a book for class and next thing you know you’re on YouTube learning how to make a Matcha Latte with 10 tabs open and Spotify paused in the background. For today, I thought we’d take a rabbit trail together through some of the fun and educational resources at your friendly neighborhood university library!
Mary and Jeff Bell Library has a YouTube Channel that’s got a new chameleon circuit (Doctor Who anyone?) to adapt to the everchanging landscape we’re experiencing right now. Emily Metcalf, our Instructional Services Librarian, wrote about it in her blog post earlier this month! While we take a stop at the Mary and Jeff Bell Library YouTube channel, we might be reminded that the library has a video streaming database: Kanopy.
You may have heard Kanopy mentioned in some of our other blog posts because it’s like Netflix! We can read about it here or we could go watch something with your free access! It has everything from Oscar-nominated and award-winning movies to documentaries. We might even watch Metropolis, the famous silent film, because you always see posters of it when you’ve gone to the movies. We also might end up searching ‘Metropolis’ and stumble upon the fact that there’s a real-life Metropolis, Illinois which is the hometown of Superman (I’ve been there and there really is a giant statue of Superman in the middle of town!).
Now that we’ve spent time on YouTube and Kanopy, we might feel like we need to create or do something (like birdwatching and photography). There are a few places we can go for inspiration! We can check out the Library Blog to see what they’ve been doing over the past few months, from the I-Create Lab being used to create face shields to possible things you can do while in quarantine. The Library Blog is a great place for inspiration, ideas, and information all year round and you can scroll through them right here! We can go to http://library.tamucc.edu/ and do a quick search through the databases on a subject of interest that will turn up journals and articles for us to peruse such as learning about plants and herbs. Another option for creating is found in our library databases: Hobbies & Crafts Reference Center. There are so many ideas to get your imagination running wild and we have a blog post for this too!
No matter what you end up doing, I hope this gave you some inspiration for your time in quarantine and beyond! Whatever you decide, I encourage you to document it. Take pictures, write in a journal, make a scrapbook, keep notes of your time spent on Netflix (or Kanopy), or whichever way you enjoy to do this. I have a blog post for this one, too! We have a COVID-19 Archive at the Mary and Jeff Bell Library and we hope that you’ll share your experiences with us. Thank you for joining me on this walk and now it’s time for you to forge ahead to make your own rabbit trails!
