Lesson 4: Proquest

1.  I searched "lunar eclipse" with 2,475 results.  Then, I limited to full text which narrowed it down to 1,675 results.  I chose to look at results with Aristotle mentioned.  There were only 2.  When I narrowed that down by the date range 2002-2007, there was only 1 article.  Just for kicks, I clicked on Kate Moss in the person limiter to see what article talked about her and a lunar eclipse.  It turned out to just be a horoscope which mentioned her. 

The limiters would be very useful for helping patrons.  They would be especially useful when you have situations where a patron may say something along the lines of, "Sometime within the last few years I read an article  about how Christopher Columbus impressed the natives by predicting a lunar eclipse, but now I can't remember where I read it.  Can you help me?"  Then, you can help with the search by entering "lunar eclipse" and narrowing down the results by the time frame and the person.

2.  I tried to find the blogs of challenge cohorts who had taken the Electronic Resources Challenge previously, so I could compare our discoveries.  I think I found about 3 different ones who are answering the same questions I am.  There may be more, but those are all I checked out.  I look forward to looking at those particular blogs as we go along. 

I did look at a few other blogs, and it just reinforced the fact that we are all so different.  Proquest seems to invoke the same excitement in some that I felt when I first was exposed to the Learning Express Library.  We all have different preferences.  I was rather surprised when I read Librarianne's profile and discovered she was a children's librarian.  I was expecting her to be a reference librarian or something else, not a children's librarian.  You just never can tell.  It's fun to be surprised.

3.  I would direct my patron to the Advanced Search option in ProQuest.  Then, I would help him figure out how to limit his search according to the specifics he gives me.  If he wanted information on specific states, we could enter those in the search field.  If not, we'll just enter "lotteries" and "states" in the search field and click on full text.  More than likely, he would be interested in fairly recent information, so I would help limit the Date Range to "last 12 months."  We could eliminate more possibilities by limiting the document type to "article," and the language to "English."  Hopefully, he could look through the results and find something to help him.  If he doesn't, I would probably go back and changed the date to the last 3 years, and take "states" out of the search field.  However, I would click on "United States - US" under location since he is not interested in lotteries in other countries.  At this point, I hope I have given him enough guidance that he can find something on his own because I've got to get back to work.