Lesson 6 -- Gale Virtual Reference Library (Advanced)

1. Your civic organization is sponsoring a community event with the theme, “Spring Holidays Around the World.” The organization needs your help in finding the following: a. Spring festival traditions from a variety of countries b. Traditional spring festival foods and their recipes c. Spring festival games or pastimes Report your findings and how you found them in GVRL.

• This gave me a pause while I tried to figure out how to go about this search. I finally went to the Title list and then typed in spring festivals in the search engine. To narrow it down I went to the left side of the page and clicked on festivals and got 118. Here is what I found.
  
  • MIMOUNA FESTIVAL -Mimouna is a springtime celebration marked by Jews in Morocco and elsewhere in North Africa. It begins on the evening that Passover ends and continues into the next day. Women set tables adorned with green stalks and filled with dried fruits and nuts, fava beans, wheat, honey, sweets, milk, a fish, and a crêpe prepared after Passover ended. Families visit each other throughout the night, with greetings expressing the beginning of a year full of merit and blessing. The following day, they go outdoors, picnicking in fields or near water.
  • NOWRŪZ (lit., "new day"), the Iranian national festival that celebrates the arrival of spring. A festival of renewal, hope, and happiness, Nowrūz begins on the first day of Farvardīn, the first month of the Iranian solar calendar, at the spring equinox, and continues for twelve days. It is the most widely celebrated, the longest, and the most colorful of Iranian festivals, and though inherited from Zoroastrian Persia, it is the only festival that is not confined to a single religious group.
  • HOLĪ is a popular North Indian festival noted for its Saturnalia-like excitement celebrated each year at the full moon in the lunar month of March–April. The ceremony is not found in South India, but a similar festival in honor of the god of love, Kāma, takes place there at the same time. While there does not seem to be a direct link between the two rites, literary sources suggest that both occasions are examples of an age-old tradition of celebrating the arrival of spring.
• I decided to do another search for spring holidays by entering that title in the search box. The Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of World Cultures came up in my search choices. When I saw my choices and found there was a country I'd never heard of called the Azerbaijan Republic, I decided to look at their holidays to see what they had. One of their most happy and anticipated holidays celebrated on March 21st is called Nawruz. It is celebrated throughout central Asia. Women make cookies and sweets and boys build bonfires and jump over them without getting burned. There were many others listed.
• I did another search for spring holiday games and found the Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of World Holidays as well as many individual populations back in the World Cultures books. The World Holidays book has food, recipes and games to go along with their holidays. I read about Poland's Holy week customs and found a recipe to make Easter Cheese.
• I also did a search for holiday food and recipes  and what that showed me was the Junior Woldmark Encyclopedia of Foods and Recipes of the World.

2. Use Advanced Search to find recently added 2012 and newer titles. Then explore a couple titles and report your findings. 

• I put in a date of after 2011 and then narrowed it to education. I found a title on Hmong's that I thought I'd explore because I wanted to see if they were the same people who have come to my home town of Huron that speak the Karen language and now I found out they aren't the same people.