Lesson 4 - Proquest

While using Proquest, I chose to search for articles on young authors.  I clicked on the option of “Full text” as instructed, and when the results page came up, I could immediately tell that I had done something wrong.  All of the articles with the random words young and author in them appeared.  I simply went back to the search page and put the words “young author” in quotes.  Then the results page looked more like what I was looking for.

The tools that looked useful on this page included the “Create Alert” option that was mentioned in the instructions as well as the list of suggested subjects and the ways to narrow or sort my search results.  Because I was given several hundred search results, I chose to sort my results by publication date and narrowed the results by using only magazine articles.  Below the options for narrowing the search results was a graph that could be used to quickly view what time period most of the articles had come from and you could get more detailed information by gliding the cursor over each year.   You could also enter your own specific date range.  This would be very helpful for students who need to have extremely current information. 

The search results for each article included the basic bibliographical information:  title, name of magazine, date, page numbers, and author.   Each article on the results page also gave links to a short preview, the citation/abstract, full text, full text in PDF, and images when available.  The images where shown in a smaller version with each article.  This makes it easy to know if the picture will be of use to you before you open the link.  There is an icon before each article that stands for magazines, trade journals, newspapers, scholarly journals, and other sources.

The preview link gives several more link options for printing, saving, citing, exporting, emailing, subjects, author, magazine, different databases that it was found in, and people named in the article.  These options would be very helpful for learners looking for more detailed information.

Another View

I enjoyed looking at the other participant’s blogs because I had not had a chance look much before now and, I hate to admit it, I am a first time blogger.  I did discover two things right off the bat.  One, I am not as far behind as I thought I was, and two, I must go on, and on, and on, and on . . . either that or I use a way bigger fontJ.  Maybe that means my eyesight is fading as fast as my hearing!  I did decide that I do rather like the blogs that include cute pictures. What can I say, forever a kid at heart.

While using the publications feature, I simply typed in the word “Library” and narrowed the search by looking for it in the title only.  It brought up 20 different publications with the title, coverage, publisher, languages, ISSN, and place of publication.  Once I chose the title “The Electronic Library” I was able to browse specific issues, search within the publication, view the most recent issue, and set up an alert.