EBSCO Animals

Another database in the EBSCO suite, Animals offers Boolean search, related items and an image search. The results seemed to be brief, concise articles on various animals. I think this website would be of primary use to children and teenagers who are looking for information about animals for projects or pictures for collages. Photographs of animals are either on color or black and white. The toughest part of recommending EBSCO Animals to the public is the relative difficulty in getting to the website, it is buried and required four clicks to get to the search page. I think that if this website was broken out and more prominently displayed on our website I think this database could be moderately helpful especially to children and teens. (Tim)

Global Issues in Context

Darren asked me to look into something on GIC I had skipped. Apparently you can create a log in and tag articles, create folders to save articles in and, best of all, set up feeds.

The folders and tagging are easy to use once you realize they're there. You have your own dashboard to go to, like we have with the blogs. If people use these there'll be less "I found this article, printed it and lost it. Now I can't find it again!" And now they'll be able to build a collection of articles over time.

The news feeds are interesting, and something I think many people will enjoy once they know we have them. You can get a feed to a newspaper in general (and they of course have papers from around the world) or you can get a news feed on a certain topic or place. You can pretty much just put in a search term and create a feed off of it. So you could get a Child Labor news feed, or a news feed on Burma.

As long as we made sure the public knew about these options, I think it would be a big deal. It would help the high school students, but I think it would be best used by the adults - especially college students.

Mary

General Reference Center Gold

GRCG is a database that offers full text and abstracts of mainstream and some academic magazines and journals. Although it is similar to the EBSCO Masterfile, there are some significant differences. After a search is done, the database offers matching subject headings, subdivisions and related subjects. While this can be confusing to the novice user, it does allow focused narrowing of results for greater accuracy. After the results list is displayed, there are tabs available for easy toggling between formats like magazines, books, multimedia and the like. I think this is a worthwhile database with some intriguing options. If there is not too much overlap with EBSCO, it can make a fine complement to that standard database. (Tim)

EBSCO Student Research Center

The basic search is simple and well designed, offering check boxes for different types of information. Also helpful in assisting students is the ability to restrict results to reading level of elementary, middle and high school. A column on the left hand side of the main screen offers searching by academic subject for quick navigation. The biggest problem with this database is that it is obscured on our web site, needing five clicks or rollovers to reach: OBPL--> Teens --> Databases and Newspapers --> Student Research Center --> Student Research Center (again.) I think this database would receive much more use if it was "broken out" and made more accessible. Despite the accessibility problem, I think this is a valuable database for helping students with papers and assignments, and I think that it should be given a more prominent place on our web site. (Tim)

Masterfile premier database

The Masterfile Premier is the "Big Kahuna" of databases, at least as far as the adult services department is concerned. It contains periodicals in both full text and abstract form, along with full text access to reference books, images and maps. This database becomes most useful when doing advanced searches which allow users and librarians to narrow the search to primary sources, pictures, biographies, government docs, etc.

BRC & GIC

Biography Resource Center - I adore it. It will be good for all ages. The tabs across the top give you choices of longer biographies, short biographies, newspaper and magazine articles, and websites. Each article gives you its own bibliography as well as further readings. It provides pictures and can be a great starting off point for anyone needing to do a more in depth project. It also has recent updates on new people of interest. It even has the Jonas Brothers, as a group and as individuals. And finally, best of all, you can search for people using different parameters. You can look for a woman born before whenever who worked with animals, etc. It also gives the citation for each article.

Global Issues in Context - Definitely aimed at more mature users. You can get a simple article, but the purpose is obviously to help you hone in on a more detailed topic. High schoolers and college students would find it useful. Searching works best when you know exactly what you’re looking for, or when you’re doing preliminary idea catching. Someone going in with a vague idea of what they need won’t be too happy, but I don’t know that there’s anything they would be happy going into then. I give it a thumbs up.

Mary

Database review - Price It Antiques

Price It allows users to search for information on antiques by keyword, date, category or price range. Typing in a search brings up a list of items that meet the query, with varying levels of detail ranging from the very detailed to the monosyllabic. With much of the data taken directly from Ebay and other auction sites that are available for free on the web, it brings into question whether this database is worthwhile for our users. Its one redeeming quality is that there are several articles on collecting in there help section that could be useful to our users.