Challenge #4 - Basic Discovery Lesson #1

ProQuest and I are old friends.  I actually teach students to use this resources every semester, especially now that we have added the Sci/Tech database to our ProQuest holdings.

My topic of interest for today is Stephen King, I check out what is happening in this authors writings every few months, mostly to catch up on short stories or magazine articles he might have written that I have missed.

I didn't limit to any "field" just started typing in the search box.

Using "Stephen King" I get 11217 results, by clicking on the Full text limit button I knock it down to 8776.  I then scrolled down to the dates bar graph and chose 2010-2019 for a limiting factor getting 1739 results.  To limit it further I selected only 2013, getting 86 results.

Scanning through the results I find articles on his stories, books, politics and business life as well as movies and potential sequels, all things I might want to check into when I have some free time.



Lesson #1a

I read through several blog posts on the ProQuest lesson.  Interesting the diversity of what is searched and also the level of knowledge about the database itself.  I did post a comment on one page about dog training, just because I knew of a good place to look for dog training help.


Lesson #2

Fascinating, I decided to try some genre fiction headings to see what magazines are available full-text.  Science Fiction/Fantasy has quite a few, Mystery or Mysteries have none.  Crime does get some titles but has nothing to do with fiction.  Western netted one title that seems to deal with fiction, Western Folklore.  Not necessarily what a western fan would be looking for.  This isn't the best way to find journals unless you already know the titles.  Still, helpful if you have a citation and want to find out if the full-text article is available here.

Advanced Challenge, Lesson #1

Search "Les Miserable" with full text and got 4144 results.  Limited to "review" or "commentary", got 526 results.  Limited again to "novels" or "literary criticism" and got 47 results.  Did pick up at leas tone review of the audio of the book which was interesting.  For someone looking for literary criticism this should get them plenty to look at, if they wanted to limit it more just take out the "novels" part and it would give a few less items to look through.


Lesson #2

I put in "hurricane sandy" library impact and got 72 results, all full text.  I then sorted the information in date order with the most recent first so articles showed in date order.  The most recent article is dated 26 Oct 2012.  Some of the more interesting topics discussed are limits on services, impact on customers and strengthening the library support.