Monday, November 11, 2013

National Geographic Virtual Library and National Geographic Kids

Since 1888, National Geographic magazine has given subscribers a window into the rest of the world, bringing amazing photographs, articles, and maps into people's homes. Now your library card gives you access to every issue of National Geographic, all the way back to the first one, plus hundreds of maps, photographs, video clips, and books from National Geographic Publishing. All this is available through our latest database, National Geographic Virtual Library. For kids, we've also added the National Geographic Kids database, which has full issues of National Geographic Kids magazine back to 2009, over 200 kids books, and hundreds of kid-friendly images.

To get to both databases, go to the library's webpage, at www.mytpl.org, and click "Research" on the navigation bar. Now click "Databases by Name", and look for National Geographic Virtual Library and National Geographic Kids under the N's. If you're in one of our libraries, you'll be taken straight to the database. Otherwise you'll need to enter the number on the back of your library card. This brings you to the NGVL home page:


Now you can click "Browse Magazines" to look through every issue of National Geographic for the last 124 years. Or you can go to "Explore Topics" to find articles, maps, pictures, and ebooks on the topics below:
You can also do an Image Search to find downloadable images. This even lets you search old ads in National Geographic magazines, if you want to see, for example, what kind of cars were being advertised in the early 1950's. If you want to see a list of all books, images, maps, and so on, you can go to Advanced Search. Just select Books, Maps, or any other category you're interested in. If you enter keywords in the search box, you'll see results that contain those keywords. If you leave the box blank and select a format..."Books" for example...you'll see a list of all the resources in that format.

National Geographic Kids is a separate database designed especially for young people. Like NGVL, it has a wide range of pictures, books, maps, and videos. To get to it, just click the yellow button that says "For Kids". This kid-friendly database is great for writing reports, finding pictures for school projects, or just learning more about the world!


We're excited about our new National Geographic databases, and we hope you will be too. If you have any questions about National Geographic Virtual Library or National Geographic Kids, call the Reference Department at 876-5861, option. 2. Have fun exploring!

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