Lesson 5: ProQuest

Basic Discovery Exercise:

1.  I did a ProQuest search on elementary library graphic novels, to get some ideas for collection development.  There were 2436 results.  On the right hand side, there are many options available for narrowing your results.  Narrowing it to scholarly journals gives you 1552 results.  I particularly like narrowing by publication year for these types of sources, since students are often required to use sources only from recent years.  When my search is limited to full text scholarly journal articles in English published from 2010-2013 The related searches box is also nice, especially for students, who may not narrow enough on their first search.

1a.  I commented on Pam's Learning Express Library blog entry.  She had some good ideas on how to use and improve this online resource.  It is great to get ideas from the other participants that we can adapt to our own library lessons.

2.  After clicking on the Publications tab at the top of the page, I looked up The Horn Book Guide, a resource one of the public libraries I worked for used for selection/collection development purposes.  You are then able to look up specific years and see the ratings for various books.  I checked 2009, when my daughter was born, thinking I may have missed some of the intermediate fiction of that year.  I noticed they gave a high rating to the Graphic Novel versions of The Boxcar children and #53 in the Hank the Cowdog series.  For research purposes, it is good to know the articles will all be full text, since you aren't going to be citing abstracts.


Common Core Connections

3.RI.5 Use text features and search tools (e.g., key words, sidebars, hyperlinks) to locate information relevant to a given topic efficiently.

For this standard, I would have students use ProQuest to practice research skills.  The following list of questions could be a worksheet, or done together in groups or as a whole class on the Smartboard.

1.  Type in "2014 Olympic Games" in the ProQuest search box. On the sidebar, narrow search results to:
Source Type: Newspapers
Language: English
Publication Year: 2014
How many articles fall under this search?  (431)

2.  Type in "Cal Ripken, Jr. AND Children's author" in the Proquest search box.   How many results are there?  (41)

3.  Choose the link to the magazine article from "Parenting" magazine called "Five Minutes With. . .Cal Ripken, Jr."  Here Cal Ripken is giving advice to parents whose children participate in sports.  Compare this advice to advice given by Coach, Connor, or Connor's Dad in Hothead.  Do his characters reflect his beliefs on sports?

4.  Type in "Rah, Rah, Radishes" in the ProQuest search box.  On the sidebar, narrow search results to:
Publication Titles:  Kirkus Reviews  (3)
Scan the titles of the articles, then answer:
What are the names of two other books that April Pulley Sayre has written that are food chants like Rah, Rah, Radishes?

5.  Stay in your list of titles from #3 above.  Click on the link for each review.  Look for word count in each.  Which of the three books has the most words?  (268--Go, Go, Grapes)