Meade School Dist. 46-1 Library Media Services

South Dakota Library Challenge:  Electronic Resource Edition

Lesson 5  |  Proquest  |  February 23, 2015

*The South Dakota Library Challenge: Electronic Resources Edition was developed by the South Dakota State Library staff to introduce you to the statewide subscription electronic resources. The Electronic Resources Challenge encourages library staff to learn more about the resources that provide expanded access to information and research tools to all schools, libraries and citizens of South Dakota.

For Lesson 5 of the SDSL Electronic Resource Challenge, we were to explore Proquest.  Proquest Research and Discovery Library delivers full-text journal articles from scholarly publications and popular magazines.  Titles range from Agriculture Research to Reading Research Quarterly to Good Housekeeping to Newsweek.  Proquest brings you feature articles, book and movie reviews, editorials, and more.  The State Library's subscription also provides newspaper indexes to three national newspapers.  

I began my Proquest search by clicking the "Full Text" box under the search bar.  The instructions told me that this would result in full text in html, pdf, or both.  I could also use the "Create Alert" feature to have Proquest run searches for me and inform me when something new on my topic is added.  

On my first attempt, I searched a very general term "yoga" and received almost 44,000 results.  Next, I narrowed my search to "yoga in schools" and got almost 15,000 results.  Finally, I narrowed it to "yoga in public schools" and received fewer results...still many (8,000), but more manageable.  I noticed that my results came in different forms, noted by different symbols:  trade journals, scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, and other sources.  Each result also provided a citation/abstract, full text html and/or full text pdf.  At the top of the page, I was also given an option to see related searches, and in the right sidebar, I could choose to narrow my search with a variety of options.  A few other options I noticed were "Save to My Research," "Email," "Print," "Cite," "Export/Save," "Create Alert," "Create RSS Feed," and "Save Search."  I am confident that if I were really researching this topic, Proquest would be a valuable tool for me to access.

For the second part of this challenge, I was to go out to the blogs of my cohort to see what they are searching on Proquest.  This, in itself, was a bit of a challenge, but I did find one by kelcy 25, and this was my reply to her post:   
"Hello!  I came across your post as I was working on the second part of this week's challenge.  I also recognized that it was hard to find many of the bloggers that were this far in the challenge.  So, I was happy when I came across your blog not too far down the list!  I found your search topic of dwarfism very interesting, and I appreciated your in-depth post about your search.  I also had to keep narrowing down my topic as I initially received about 45,000 results!  I did find some very good articles on my topic, though, and I know that Proquest is a great resource for our students.  Keep up the good work in the Challenge!"

For the last part of this week's challenge, I clicked the Publications tab at the top of the page.  Upon doing so, I got an alphabetical list of the periodicals indexed in Proquest and the years included.  I did a search for a journal in my profession by typing "school library" in the search box. I received two results:  School Library Journal and School Library Monthly.  School Library Journal has full-text coverage from January 1996 to present and coverage in any format from January 1988 to present.  School Library Monthly has full-text coverage from October 2002 to May/June 2014, and coverage in any format from January 1996 to May/June 2014.  When I clicked on School Library Journal, I was then given the option to search within the publication or to browse specific issues.  

Proquest is definitely a resource that I will be recommending to my students for their research projects.