Thing 17: Research and Reference

1.  Student Research: I modified the first part of the assignment.  My district subscribes to some Cengage/Gale Infotrac databases.  Additionally, three years ago, I bought a number of Cengage/Gale's reference ebooks.  Eastern has it own page for the databases and ebooks, and, as media specialist, I have worked hard to get both teachers and students to use them effectively. If you would like the non-district login password to check them out, just contact me.  My efforts have been modestly successful.  All the language arts teachers in the high school require students to use the Infotrac databases for research papers, but most of the other teachers in social studies, science, etc. only infrequently require kids to use them.  When I can get kids and teachers to think about using them, and I show them all the ways they can search, cite, and distribute the information they find, they are thrilled that I have saved them a ton of time. 
I compared my databases against those of SIRS Renaissance.  The first thing I noticed is that SIRS allows for natural language searching.  Infotrac is strictly a keyword/subject search engine.  Point to SIRS.  In terms of GUI, I think that Infotrac is more attractive and clearer and cleaner to use. Point to Infotrac.  I did a search on both using the keyword/subject "philosophy".  Infotrac returned many more hits than did SIRS even though SIRS lists the term as a specific subject.  However, while Infotrac delivered more results, it also defaulted to treating the term as a keyword rather than a subject and most of the hits were sources where the term appeared, but did directly deal with the subject of philosophy.  SIRS result list did treat the term as a subject.  More direct hits. On the other hand, Infotrac did deliver more material about the subject of philosophy when the search was modified.  Point to neither.  When I click on the same magazine article of each, I believed that the layout of the page of Infotrac was better organized with its tools more clearly identified, the font was clearer, the citation options included different versions of MLA as well as APA formats.  They both as the same tools for sharing, bookmarking, printing, etc., but Infotrac was easier to navigate then SIRS in my view. Point to Infotrac.

2.  Advanced Research:  One of the many Infotrac databases Forest Hills doesn't s subscribe to is Educator's Reference Complete.  We thought about it a number of years ago, but decided it was too pricy.  For many of the same reasons I like the look and feel of our databases at Eastern, I like the look and feel of this Infotrac database.  I did a search for articles concerning "web 2.0".  The search returned 319 full text articles.  As with our Infotrac results, I like the detail that each "hit" contains.  It is very useful to know not only how many words, but how many pages would printed if I decided I needed a hard copy.  The results list defaults to putting the most recent article at the top.  Sometimes this is useful, but I would prefer that the best results given my search terms are at the top rather than just the most current.  You CAN choose Relevant to resort, but it should be the default.  It is very useful that you can refine your search to only include "Peer Reviewed" materials.  Cuts out the "popular" publications and add authenticity to the results.  As with any database, it does not have everything possible in terms of all publications dealing with every subject of education.  But it comes closer than any other data I have used.

3.  Work Cited-1: 

4. Works Cited-2: