The Joys of TEL

One of the great wonders of the Tennessee State Library and Archives (TSLA) is the Tennessee Electronic Library (TEL), which can be accessed from the main page of the TSLA website: http://www.state.tn.us/tsla/. Poking around for just a few minutes this morning, I located several articles on sheep's milk (very trendy in Europe for making feta cheese), as well as directions for making a drop spindle, the simple tool by which lots of people first learn to spin wool, by using a pencil and a potato (that's pretty simple, all right!) or a dowel rod and a CD.

The joys of TEL include the following wonders:

• you can choose either abstracts or full-text articles as you search;
• you can select a PDF version of many articles, so you can look at the photos and diagrams as you read;
• you can search through a huge list of magazines, academic journals, reference lists, newspapers, and multimedia sources;
• and (most delightful of all) TEL gives you the correct citation for the article, in MLA style and a couple of others, and then will export that information to several types of third-party software!

Lazy Kate's bizarre observation of the day: If you were just learning to speak English, wouldn't you expect "wool" to rhyme with "tool"?