http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/08/are-state-library-research-data
This month, over at Teachers Teaching Teachers, Susan Ettenheim, Lee Baber and others are looking into how and why to use state library research databases, and they have given us a homework assignment:Find you own states database collection (paid for by your taxes!).... Now, think of something you are wondering about. Is it your aunts newly diagnosed illness, is it a question about Iraq, is it the history of a neighborhood fixture, is it something about a book youve been reading this summer? Search in these state funded free resources and see what you find. If you can, wed love you to do the same search in some other places too, maybe Google, maybe findarticles.com, maybe Wikipedia...Its time to walk the talk! TTT67 - August 15, 2007
Here's the results of dipping my toes into the New York Online Virtual Electronic Library (NOVELNY). These are just my first impressions, and they leave me wondering whether a more careful study has ever been done than the one here that we are doing for oursleves. Has anyone ever more carefully studied and described the differences one finds between searching in publically available sources, and these protected databases?
Last month I used the the keyword "relationships" to show how to set up subscription alerts for on-going searches in Google Blogs, Google News, EveryZing (audio), and FindArticles. By using the same word to do a NOVELNY databases search, perhaps I can compare resusts. On the search page, I choose "Full-text articles only," then I ask for a search in "All Resources," and I do a search for the the keyword, "relationships." This gives me almost 45,000 hits in 14 databases.
| 1 | EBSCO Animals | | |
| 65 | Funk & Wagnall's New World Encyclopedia | | |
| 949 | General Science Collection | | |
| 15 | Health & Wellness Resource Center | | |
| 326 | Primary Search | | |
| 225 | TOPICSearch | | |
| 15687 | MasterFILE Select | | |
| 170 | Business & Company Resource Center | | |
| 24142 | Custom Newspaper Database | | |
| 62 | Informe Revistas en Espanol - Spanish | | |
| 2058 | New York State Newspapers | | |
| 1194 | National Newspaper Index | | |
| 10 | Twayne Authors Series | | |
| 43 | Gale Virtual Reference Library (All) | |
