Proquest

Advanced Challenge:

1. A full text search for Les Miserables resulted in 5359 results, many of which were about the movie and  theatrical musicals. Selecting "literary criticismfrom" the subject list rsulted in 302 results. Again, it containied irrelevant things.  Selecting "novels" as a subgroup under "literary criticism" brought the number down to 82, but there were some non-English articles so by selecting "English" under "language there were 79 results. Finally selecting "commentary" under "document type" resulted in 23 managable results.

2. Searching full text  "hurricane Sandy AND libraries" brought up 668 results. By sorting them by date with newest first I discovered there were several with references to "Sandy Hook".  So I added not "Sandy Hook" to my original search sorted them by date.  There were fewer results but I couldn't find a way to get information only about the huriricane's impact on the libraries. I messed with subjects, document type, publication title and sources type, but couldn't get it narrowed down. I would be very interested to see what everyone else came up with.


Common Core Connections:

I don't think I would encourge my high school students to use ProQuest.  It is a very cumbersome database that lacks intuitive searching.  It seems very "librarian-like" which is to say, people who are not librarians do not think in terms of subject, publication title, document type, classification and tags.  This is more suited to an academic setting and I would think the end-user would have to have a librarian right next to them during the whole search to help them.  My patience was seriously tested with this database and I'm a librarian!  I can't imagine what a high school student would make of this.