Monday, February 7, 2011
Proquest
I searched for "The Alamo" on the Proquest database because our 8th grade students will start a research project next week on this topic. I got 452 results in my search. The first ten results that I looked at were book reviews which would not be helpful for our students with their research project. I then looked at the results on the next couple of screens, and again I found more book or video reviews and one magazine article that might be helpful. The rest of the results were not appropriate for our research project. I then did an advanced search using "Alamo" and "American History" as search terms, but added "not book reviews" as the third search term. I got 21 results from this search. Again I found more book and film reviews and not much else for information that would be helpful in the 8th grade research project. Am I searching incorrectly? I could see my students would be quickly on Google with this type of results on Proquest. I have used Proquest in the past, but I always found a lot of book reviews in my results list. I also think that the reading level might be too advanced for most of our middle school students. I have encouraged our gifted class to use Proquest for their research projects.
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Mary, I agree that without quite a bit of teacher & librarian help, ProQuest is above the level of most middle schoolers. It is recommended for high school and above and is a general online magazine database. I think you will find better magazine results in SIRS Discoverer or World Book Students for your age group, as they are targeted for that age group and designed to support curriculum. I tried a search for Alamo myself. Did you try using the suggested topics at the top of the results to narrow your search? I tried "Alamo" AND "Texas History" AND NOT "reviews" in Advanced Search and got 14 results. Probably not all of them would apply, either. To answer your question, yes, I think you are searching correctly, but not all topics are covered in every database. Thanks for your work here.
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