Thursday, February 9, 2012

Proquest

There are more than 10,000 articles written about Charles Dickens that are available in Proquest, and I attempted to read several of them in this assignment. It was a challenge! I've always thought I have a decent vocabulary, but I needed a dictionary to decipher the article about Dickens's view on slavery! Proquest is definitely more scholarly - for those serious about their research.

My first search was for Quilting, an activity I wish I had more time to do.  Most of the articles listed were for book reviews in Library Journal.  I think this topic is better searched in a different database.... 

Then I decided to look up Charles Dickens, whose 200th birthday was February 7.  I figured he would be fodder for more scholarly research, and I was correct.  The focus of the 10,000+ articles varied, from Dickens's first visit to America in 1842, to his views on slavery, even to the cause of his death in 1870.  Articles were from a variety of publications as well.  Some were more scholarly than others. 

High School and College students doing research should be able to find information using Proquest, but they will need to persevere.    It will take time to sift through the articles. 

For the third part of this assignment (Publications), I looked for Public Libraries and got one hit:  Public Libraries.  Then I tried Libraries and got 9 hits for Title, and 72 for In Publication Summary.  I was thinking this could be very helpful, since our library has dropped subscriptions to several professional journals.  But then I checked out Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books, hoping to read current book reviews, only to find that there is a one-year delay.  All I can read at this time is an abstract and citation for reviewed titles.  So now I am frustrated.  It's like they are holding a carrot just out of my reach!

I did check out some of the other blogs, and commented on one of them.  It's fun to see what others are looking up and to note their search strategies.  (I hope they don't mind if I borrow some of their techniques to help our patrons.)  Reading my colleagues posts is also confirmation that I am on the right track in this Challenge.

 

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Miss Nancy! I am sorry for your frustrations with this resource. Yes, there are many results here, but compared to Google? And what is found in ProQuest is from "good" sources. We like ProQuest for its breadth of material from popular, trade, and scholarly journals. You can limit by type, if you don't want to get too high falutin'. :) Please try your quilting search again. This time, after you get search results, look at the right sidebar. It will say "narrow results by," choose "document type." Notice that it allows you to include or exclude many different document types, so you could exclude book reviews. There's some good quilting stuff there--ask Julie! :) We like the publications tab, as it shows you that you can read hard-to-obtain journals for free 24/7. Coverage (and delays) are dictated by the publisher, sorry. However, Horn Book is there, another great children's lit resources. Thanks for your comments, Nancy!!

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  2. Hi Nanncy! You are doing such a good job on your blog. Glad we are able to do this Challenge and learn more!
    That's a lot of articles you found on Charles Dickens. I agree someone would need to do some sifting!

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