ProQuest has a wide variety of articles and information, but it was hard to find exactly what I wanted.
I tried several different ways to find information for the student needing literary criticism of Les Miserables. The most successful search resulted when I used quotation marks around the title ["les miserables"]. I also did searches using the title and author's name.... I first limited the results by excluding any and everything having to do with music, theater, film, etc. in the subject option. I tried again by limiting the results to literary criticism in English. My final number of articles was 42, but not all of them would be helpful. There were book reviews of biographies of Victor Hugo, and articles that just mentioned Les Miserables in passing. This student may need to find another source of information for her assignment, but this is a good place to start. Using ProQuest provides access to journals that would not be available at the library, so it is a useful resource.
Finding information about the impact of Hurricane Sandy on libraries was even more difficult I thought. For my first attempt, I used the Advanced Search option. I searched for libraries AND "hurricane sandy." This resulted in 238 documents: the newest was February 13, 2013. However, it was an article listing who would be sitting in Michelle Obama's box at the State of the Union speech, and had nothing to do with the impact of Hurricane Sandy on libraries.
Next I limited the results by subject, including options like storm damage, library collections, displaced persons, disaster relief, etc., and narrowed the results to ten. None of these were what I wanted either.
So I tried a different search. This time I used "hurricane sandy" in the basic search box which resulted in over 9000 articles. When I searched for "hurricane sandy" impact, there were over 2000 documents. I wanted to limit either search by subject, but libraries was not an option to include or exclude.
I have spent quite a lot of time searching for relevant results with little success. What am I doing wrong? There's probably a simple way to search, and I will feel pretty silly when someone points it out to me, but at this point, I am clueless!
Hi Miss Nancy,
ReplyDeleteSometimes searching for information can be frustrating! I think you did a great job of describing your search strategies. It makes it easy to "talk" with you about your search and see if there are some ways to get better results.
Great strategy to use quotation marks to keep "les miserables" together! If you try using the subjects (after you've done the basic search >> on the right hand side of the page >> click on the "more" it will bring up a lot of subjects in the search) you will see subjects like "books" and also "literary criticsm". If you check those, it will only give you results that have those subjects. Good luck!
I did your search (basic search) libraries and "hurricane sandy" and came up with the same 238 articles--it is a pretty skimmable list of articles that have impact of Hurricane Sandy. Yes, when you sort by date, you do see some stuff about the State of the Union speech. The relevance sort does give some articles that sound pretty useful. I think your search was ok!
Good work!
Julie