Proquest

I began with a basic search on daylight savings. I found several articles regarding its history which I found very interesting. The sight offers many ways to narrow your search to enable the person to limit the search and get results that pertain to what is needed.

I did a search for the Library Journal. I specified what I was looking for and had 6 results. Proquest is an excellent data base for journals. Most journals are very costly and small libraries are unable to subscribe to them directly. This is an excellent way to provide access to scholarly journals that otherwise would be unavailable to our patrons.

In order to narrow the search for the student interested in literary criticism of Victor Hugo's novel, Les Miserables, I typed "Les Miserables by Victor Hugo" in the search bar. I narrowed the subject category to literary criticism and writers.  I really struggled with the results being only about the novel. I also selected English as the language. I was able to narrow the results to a small number with the top few being excellent library criticisms. I learned a lot about using the sidebar on the right to narrow the results. I had never done this in the past and feel it will benefit my ability to assist patrons.

In searching for the most current information about the impact of Hurricane Sandy on libraries, I entered the hurricane and libraries for the search. I was able to very quickly narrow the articles to the most recent by using the publication date specification on the right sidebar. I found this to be much easier to narrow to specific information than the literary criticism!

Excellent resource - especially for those libraries with limited funds and low demand for journals. Thank you to the State Library for continuing to offer this as one of the data bases.