Discussion 10: Periodicals: EBSCO is Awesome!

I really like EBSCO and have found lots of useful information using it. I like the way you can select only the journals you want to peruse and leave out ones you don’t wish to look at. I always use the advanced search options so that I can select only the type of information I need. For example, I can ask for search results which are only in full text, and are online, and are scholarly articles. I can also eliminate things that I don’t want to appear in my search as well and that helps save time because I don’t have sift through a whole bunch of search results that I don’t want.  I find the citations given for search results informative and help me to decide which articles I want to read in the full text form. Usually you can select either a PDF version or an HTML version. There is also a brief index on the left side called “inside this work” which links to the different sections of longer articles.  On the right side is a tool bar which has links for emailing the article, storing the article in a folder that you create, printing the article, bookmarking the article, and linking the article. But my favourite tool of all is the citation button. I love that you can just click a button and it will create the citation for you in the style you want. That is so convenient! Another handy tool is the “Find Similar Results” button. Sometimes I find it takes a while to find the exact topic that I am looking for and so once I do, I can click on this button to find more results like this one. For example I searched for the article “Can We Make Peace with Wikipedia?” By Chris Harris and then clicked on “more like this” and it brought up three closely related articles. This is a great tool but sometimes I still find the results are quite varied and not similar at all to what I am looking! I think this is one “smart” tool that is not so smart! 

I wish the subject searches could be improved to allow for more unique search terms that are defined by the user because sometimes it is difficult to know what the correct search term is (especially when exploring an unfamiliar topic). When I am not entering in the correct search term my subject searches don’t provide me with as many good results that I would hope for. I am so used to performing Google searches using keywords which provide lots of good results and it would be nice to have that in library searches too. Using the correct search term can take a bit of skill and not using the correct search term makes searches not as effectively as they could be. For example, I entered the keywords “library research skills elementary school” in the database called Education Research Complete just to see what would happen. The first result that came back was very related to my search but the second hit was “Exploring the Media Literacy of Taiwanese Elementary School Students.” However, having said all this, using the advanced search options brings up better results.

I love using this UBC library resource and I will miss it when I have completed my diploma. I wonder if there is a way to keep your library card active after your degree. I am definitely going to find out!