Friday, February 15, 2013
ProQuest Advanced Challange & Common Core
When I put in Les Miserables and tried to find just literary criticism's I came up with 1605 results. I used the Document Type and Subject limiters on the side but still ended up getting movie and play reviews. I even limited it to Scholarly Journals thinking that would help.
I then worked on the Hurricane Sandy question. When I put in
Hurricane Sandy Libraries and searched I got 668 results. When I
was more specific and put in Hurricane Sandy Impact on Libraries
got 264 results but after scrolling through 4 pages not one of them
pertained to the actual question. I became very frustrated and found
Proquest to be a very cumbersome site to use espcially after using
SIRS. It would be interesting to see if the students would like the
Create Alert feature when doing research for a paper. It seemed
easy enough to set up.
Common Core
1.12.5 Critique resources for accuracy, currency, reliability,
usefulness, validity, scope, purpose, and intended audience.
(Evaluate)
11th Grade students would each be given a current topic
and using both SIRS and Proquest would research and evaluate
the two sites using the criteria above. Results would be given in
a one to two page paper.
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Hi, Cathy, Your Common Core connection is excellent!! We recommend starting students in SIRS Issues Researcher and then going to ProQuest for more information. You can use SIRS subject terms (found in the search results) in ProQuest for efficient searching. Sorry for your frustration in answering the ProQuest search questions. To get really specific in ProQuest can involve a lot of tinkering, but it can pay off. For the Les Miz question, you can use the limiter "Subject" on the right side. Click "more options." Then check "Exclude" on all the subjects having to do with the movie, play, and musical. That will really help you narrow down your search. Your work on the Hurricane Sandy question was just right, Cathy. I'm supposing you got articles that mentioned grants libraries in the Hurricane area could apply for and articles about libraries being used as shelters and community centers during the Hurricane. There's even one about a racoon in a library! These are all impacts. Take a look at what some of your fellow Challengers are saying about ProQuest and see how they attacked these questions. Thanks for toughing out here!
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