This week the MARVELous assignment involves Maine Newsstand and the ProQuest Database. Those who have been reading along as this blog progresses, may remember that I posted about Maine Newsstand in July. So much for my originality!
The first piece of this assignment is to look at the Maine Newsstand homepage. This page, as are most of the databases, is pleasant to look at – not a lot of extraneous things to distract the user. The Basicsearch works really well, so enough said on that I guess.
Next on my list is to watch the tutorial about Maine Newsstand and ProQuest. This is another very informative and easily understood visual aid created by the staff at the Maine State Library.
What to search?
“Gardiner Public Library” is what my fingers type – notice the quotation marks, I learned my lesson when I blogged about Maine Newsstand in July. I check the Full Text radio box, my results are 346 items. On the right side of the page I see that of the 346 items, 334 are Newspapers, and 12 are Wire Feeds. Not exactly sure what the difference is, I click on Wire Feeds. These look to be articles, originally printed in a local, Maine newspaper and then picked up for distribution through a Wire Service. Not sure whether this was a “DUH” or an “AHA” moment, but either way, I learned something new.
Part of this assignment is to save my search. Easy-peasey – I just click on the Save Search button on the right side of the page, just below the search bar. I am asked to name my search – “library” – makes sense to me. A pop-up window tells me that my search is saved, and I can access the search from Save Searches in the My Researchsection of this page. Because I’m curious, I check My Research.
The My Researchpage has several interesting tabs, which include Searches. Clicking on this tab shows me my search, what database I searched, the date I saved the search, as well giving me a place to add notes, modify my search, delete, or create an alert.
This looks like a database I will be using!
I have checked on several of my fellow bloggers. We all seem to be learning and exploring some exciting information!