South Dakota Library Challenge, Lesson 3

This lesson was about how to use Proquest. I have already used Proquest quite often, so this one was not too difficult. Since we are an academic library, one of our main functions is to help students find credible resources for research papers. Proquest is one of the main sources we turn to for that. One great thing about it is that you can set your search to full text only. This will pull up only sources for which the whole article is right there, rather than just a citation. Sometimes it broadens the search to open it up to non-full text articles, but in that case there is usually a bit of extra time involved in getting the article. For some reason our students like to wait until the last minute to do their research, and don't have time for that, so we use the "full text only" function to narrow it down.
In my search, I searched for information on eating disorders. I got 23,182 results. Just skimming down the list on the first few pages, it looked as if most of the articles were relevant to the topics (every once in a while something off the wall comes up!) and most were from medical journals. Also popping up was a list of related topics that could narrow down the subject further, such as "eating disorders and women" and "Eating disorders and teenagers". There were tabs at the top of the list of articles that could sort it into different source types, such as scholarly, magazines, trade publications, newspapers, reference and dissertations. Very handy feature there.
Next I searched the Publications section for journal about libraries. 24 results came up....who knew there were that many! I had only actually heard of one of them on the list. Lots of possibilities there. This would be a good feature for finding source material about a particular field of interest.