I've always had a difficult time picking a topic to research. So for the first part of the lesson I attempted to look up several items: St. Patrick's Day, St. Valentine, Lipizzaner stallions, Borglun, Ziolkowski without much success. (These were all suggestions from patrons in the library at the time trying to help me out with ideas.) Finally we settled on "capital punishment" which gave me several resources in return. One was a book entitled A Capital Punishment Handbook which was a very complete resource. The publication date was 1993, which was kind of dated for a resource. Another book, Death Penalty: For and Against had a print date of 1998, which was better, but it was a compilation of essays by a variety of authors, so it would depend on the type of knowledge the researcher needed. I think the first source would be better for a general topic. There were a few other sources that did not seem to have anything to do with my basic search such as: Game Theory and the Environment and Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Well, but I think that was because I should have used advanced search instead of basic!
Constitution Day research yielded an interesting mix of things. I tried a basic search using "Constitution Day". I did not find anything useful (in my opinion!). Then I tried "U.S. Constitution History" as subject and one of the titles that popped up was about the Sudan. (?) I tried doing an advanced search with U.S. Constitution and several other attempts. I was very frustrated. Maybe I need a tutorial? So next I went to the HELP! and went through the instructions. Still didn't work. I really am at a loss here.
I was able to get some results for the last part of the assignment and pulled up several titles by University of Nebraska Press that would have been helpful for a study of Western history. However, I opened several of the titles and most of them were really advanced for high school research. Perhaps better for high school seniors and college students. There was one that I thought might be interesting for a project on Native American religions as a narrowed research project on Western history: Wakinyan : Lakota Religion in the Twentieth Century. And, of course, I tried typing in South Dakota without any results! (How many other people tried that as well??)
I did appreciate the ease of downloading the books to the desktop and the way EbscoHost isolated the most pertinent passages for a quick review which helped to discover if the resource would be useful or not.
Perhaps I need a little more input on this particular resource before I help someone else with it. I believe I would tend to avoid this one otherwise!
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1 comment:
Hi, Diane, thanks for giving this one a whirl. These titles were purchased several years ago to help public libraries expand their non-fiction collections. The State Library has been unable to add new titles since. In this resource, I find better results with more general terms. "U.S. Constitution" (without quotes) gives me 47 results, most of which are relevant. You're right, most of these titles are at an adult level. You understand the publisher search & why you didn't get results for South Dakota. You might enjoy doing a general basic search for South Dakota, though--some good stuff! Extra credit to your patrons for their creative research suggestions. :)
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