Gale Virtual Reference Library- Session #6 Resource Challenge

Advanced Challenge--asked for us to help a civic organization get information for a community event with the theme "Spring Holidays Around the World".  We need to find spring festival traditions from a variety of countries, as well as traditional spring festival foods and recipes, along with some spring festival games or past-times.  This turned out to be so interesting, I found myself reading on and on.

I started by clicking "multi-cultural" on the left and typing "spring holidays" in the search box.  On the left it showed the result 10 under holidays.  When I went here, I could click on the cover and view the table of contents.  This is how I started my search for my first country I selected Bolivia.  I learned that they celebrate many Catholic holidays such as Easter, Christmas, Labor Day and their Independence Day is on Aug. 6.  I didn't do a lot of reading here, but most of these Catholic, Christian holidays are celebrated in similar fashion as here in the U.S.

For my second search of a countries spring festivals, I returned to the main page of GVRL, so I could locate a different avenue of searching.  This time I selected "Nation & World" on the left. One of the book titles displayed was Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia World of Holidays. I clicked on the cover to get to the Table of Contents.  Here I selected some things that interested me.  I picked Buddha's Birthday which is celebrated on a full moon day in the month of Visakhua (usually May, or in some countries April).  It is also referred to as Visakhua Puja, Buddha's Day, or Flower Festival.  I scrolled down to view customs, traditions, ceremonies.  In celebration of Buddha's Day, monks and crowds of worshippers holding candles or lamps, decorated with flowers in many designs, walk around Buddha statues in a clockwise circle. This practice is also called wien tien,  and began as a ritual to secure a peaceful death and safe passage to nirvana, Buddhist paradise. After this the people listen to music and sermons, priests eat fruit and Buddhists enjoy hta-ma-re (sticky rice with coconut) and sweet tea. This is observed in similar (but unique) fashions in Thailand, S. Korea, Japan (where lanterns are used) and Sri Lanka.

To add a third festival to our Spring Festival Event, I researched Carnival (Brazil) Karneval (Germany) Carnevale (Italy) Mardi Gras (U.S.) Carnival (Trinidad & Tobogo, U.S.)  They all have similar yet distinct celebrations that have it's history between A.D.1000 to 1300, as a way to ease the transition from the season of Epiphany to the sacrifices of Lent.  Though based on Christian events, it is a non-religious folk festival.  Carnival includes feasting, drinking, parades, masquerades and balls.  Dates for this festival usually falls in Feb. or March.  Every country and city that celebrates Carnival has unique customs, but parades are common.  In some there are closing ceremonies that involve burning, burying, or disposing of celebration items.  This festival comes before a period of fasting and abstinence (Lent).  Foods included in this festival are deep fried pastries, cakes, donuts, pancakes, fritters.  Games and throws include a popular event where they slide a dove down a rope from the town's bell tower in Italy.  Throwing favors and cheap plastic beads is common at Mardi Gras along with designing costumes, and parading through the streets.

For any of these festivals, there is another book entitled Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of Foods and Recipes of the World-2012. This could be used for more research on the foods to be served at your "Spring Holidays Around the World" Event.

We were also to use the Advanced Search to find recently added items between 2012 and newer titles. I was a little confused since it didn't give me a search topic, so I suppose I was to do the Spring Festival, BUT I searched for science books since our science fair is coming up and middle school kids are working on ideas.  I clicked "advanced search" and in the middle of the page, I selected "between" to narrow the search for " 2012 and newer", I selected "science" then "general" and received 704 results.  I looked through some thinking of students looking for science fair projects.