Sailor Database Review: Gale Virtual Reference Library

Gale Virtual Reference Library makes available online the full text of 25 great reference sources. The list of sources available in the Sailor database are:

• Africa: An Encyclopedia for Students , 4v, 2002
• American Decades , 10v, 2001
• American Decades Primary Sources , 10v, 2004
• American Eras , 8v, 1997 history
• Ancient Civilizations Reference Library , 3v, 2000
• Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians Since 1990 , 2v, 2004
• Chemical Elements: From Carbon to Krypton , 3v, 2006
• Colonial America Reference Library , 6v, 2000
• Countries and Their Cultures , 4v, 2001
• Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library , 4v, 2005
• Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion , 3v, 2005
• Encyclopedia of Food and Culture , 3v, 2003
• Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World , 2v, 2004
• Encyclopedia of Religion , 2nd ed., 15v, 2005
• Encyclopedia of World Cultures , 10v, 1996
• Encyclopedia of World Cultures: Supplement , 2002
• Endangered Species , 2nd ed., 3v, 2004
• Environmental Encyclopedia , 3rd ed., 2v, 2003
• Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of Foods and Recipes of the World , 4v, 2002
• Middle Ages Reference Library , 5v, 2001
• Middle East Conflict Reference Library , 4v, 2006
• Renaissance and Reformation Reference Library , 6v, 2002
• UXL Encyclopedia of Biomes , 3v, 2000
• UXL Encyclopedia of Drugs and Addictive Substances , 5v, 2006
• Witchcraft in America , 2001

The entire list may be searched by keyword or the search maybe limited to a specific source. A description of each source is available by clicking on the title. For each source, you also have access to an e-index—just click on the appropriate entry and you will go directly to the page with that information.

This database is perfect for those customers who are searching for information on a specific subject and cannot get into the library to access these sources normally available only in print form.

Sailor Database Review: World Book Online Reference Center

For years, one of the essential ready reference print sources, World Book Online Reference Center takes it a few steps further. There are four versions available, which enable different ages to access information that is appropriate for all ages and ability levels.

• World Book Kids: based on World Books Discovery Encyclopedia, this version offers easy-to-read articles, images, web sites, selected and edited for the younger elementary school age group. Also included are many interactive games, activities, and teacher resources.
  
  
• World Book Student: the redesigned and upgraded version of the World Book Online Reference Center. This version is aimed at the elementary and middle school student and contains all the articles from the World Book Encyclopedia (print version), a biography section, a dictionary and atlas, an extensive multimedia collection, as well as many editor selected web sites. There is a great section called How To Do Research which discusses research skills for students and also research skills for educators. Students can save the content from any search results page by checking the box next to the item and clicking on “Save to My Backpack.”
  
  
• World Book Advanced: Designed for high school and college students, this version contains much of what is in the World Book Student version plus thousands of ebooks (both fiction and nonfiction), a primary source database, pathfinders and more. The student can search for information in the fully integrated single search mode, or can opt for the advanced search and limit their search to ebooks or primary sources, etc. There is a citation builder available, and all searches can be saved to My Research.
  

• Enciclopedia Estudiantil Hallazgos: This is the Student Discovery Encyclopedia in Spanish. It is organized so information can be found by clicking on the first letter of the article title.

Sailor Database Review: Health & Wellness Resource Center

Looking for an overview of Marfan Syndrome for a school assignment? Have a friend who is looking for alternative treatments for her migraine headaches? Need to know the possible side effects of that new drug you started taking? Have a student looking for case studies on bipolar disorders?

Kate Niemcyzk, the consumer health librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library/State Library Resource Center, reviews Gale’s Health & Wellness Resource Center to see if it can help you answer those questions and others. The database is crammed full of useful information While it has great information, it also comes with some problem areas.

The Home page gives you a variety of ways to search. There are both tabs and boxes. The most comprehensive search is to use either the “Advanced Search” tab at the top or the “search” box. A search in either of these places will bring up results divided by source: magazines and journals, videos with their text, drug & herb information, and overviews from books. In search, you can limit to full-text articles, consumer information and refereed publications.

Problem Area: The results displays are limited to only 10 items per page. Any items you mark on a page to be kept will be lost unless you “Update Marked List” before you leave that page—even if it is to read one of your hits on that page.

The “Diseases and Conditions” tab allows you to alphabetically access the wonderful overviews found in the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. The entries are arranged in a useful way for assignments: definition & description, causes & symptoms, diagnosis, treatment & prognosis.
Problem Area: There don’t appear to be any “see references”. For example, I was looking for high blood pressure, and did not find it. I found any entry for hypertension. There wasn’t anything telling me at high blood pressure to “see” hypertension.



The “Alternative Medicine” tab allows you to alphabetically access the overviews found in the Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine. These articles include much of the same information as the articles in Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine with the addition of alternative medicine’s view of the cause. Both traditional allopathic treatments and alternative/complementary treatments are included.

Problem Area: Again, no “see references.”

Drugs & Herbal Remedies can be searched through either a box or tab. Typing in an herb, prescription or over-the-counter drug by generic or brand name, brings up a list of hits from mostly print sources clearly showing their publication dates. The sources include Detailed Drug Information for the Consumer, Drug Information for Consumers from PDRhealth.com, and The PDR for Herbal Medicines.

Problem Area: A search by drug name usually brings up a long list of mostly irrelevant hits (but the relevant hits will be at the top.) The results displays are limited to only 10 items per page. There is no “fuzzy” search, so if you spelled the name wrong, it will not offer you any alternative spellings.

The Health & Wellness Resource Center also includes a dictionary (which unlike the dictionary in MedlinePlus, does not offer alternative spellings if you don’t get any hits), a directory of hospitals, organizations, journals, and programs, a list of trusted Web sites, and a list of health assessment tools and calculators.

I expect to most often use the overviews in the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine and the Search function. Many times the overviews in the print version of the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine have been perfect for both students working on assignments and for people just starting to research their own newly diagnosed condition. The Search function will be useful for people who are interested in looking for articles or doing more in depth research—both students who need more than an overview and customers looking for information about a disease or condition for personal reasons.

Sailor Database Review: Discovering Collections

Discovering Collection is a Thompson Gale database aimed at middle and high school students. It is designed to introduce students to the strategies for conducting research and obtaining reliable information on a topic. The database provides aggregated links to full text sources on a broad variety of topics. The overwhelming majority of returns are articles generated specifically for this database or for other proprietary Gale resources.

Students can explore a subject either by following one of six “topic trees” (Cultures, Geography, Literature, Science, U.S. History, World History), or, alternatively, by performing basic or advanced searches. The basic search returns results using both keyword and subject searches, and the advanced search offers greater precision through the use of Boolean operators. Even basic returns can be limited by content level and content type. Articles in the database are available in written form or as audio MP3s. Discovering Collection would be useful for students who are required to do research on topics for which paper resources are limited and who are not permitted to use internet resources.

Sailor Database Review: Kids Infobits

Kids Infobits is a Thompson Gale database aggregating links to information in a variety of knowledge domains. Sources include online encyclopedia entries, entries in almanacs and other ready reference resources, articles in periodicals such as Highlights for Children or Science News for Kids, and entries created specifically for Kids Infobits. The database is intended as a tool to teach elementary school students the rudiments of online research and to provide vetted sources of factual information.

Kids Infobits would be useful for students who are required to do research on topics for which paper resources are limited and who are not permitted to use internet resources. Topics can be browsed from hierarchically arranged pages of topics (e.g. People → Scientists and Inventors → Niels Bohr) or searched by both keyword and a controlled vocabulary subject guide. The advanced search page provides an opportunity to gain Boolean search skills, but no explanation of Boolean operators for the uninitiated.

Sailor Database Review: General OneFile

Gale’s General OneFile brings to your customers’ fingertips an impressive array of materials ranging from newsletters to major national newspapers in the United States and from popular and business magazines to peer-reviewed academic journals. There are 11,000 titles in all and more than 6,300 full-text titles. The database provides archival coverage back to 1980.

Database users can search both across and within publications. Both basic and advanced search options are provided in a highly user-friendly manner. In browsing publications, users can limit their browses to materials in one of four languages, from one of 49 countries, by general publication subject, by publication format, by target audience, to full-text publications, and to peer-reviewed publications. Database users can also browse an alphabetical list of highly specific subjects to find articles.

General OneFile users may set up RSS feeds on particular subjects with articles delivered either to their email accounts or appearing on their individually configured homepages.

Sailor Database Review: Custom Newspapers

Gale's Infotrac Custom Newspapers database, available through Sailor, makes available to your patrons full-text transcriptions of several medium circulation dailies, which mix marginally adequate national coverage with excellent regional coverage, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Star Tribune (Minneapolis), the San Francisco Chronicle, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Detroit Free Press. The database does not include full access (though a few columns are available) to any of the large-circulation national newspapers -- USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal -- but is a valuable supplement to a national newspaper database (eg. ProQuest “National Newspapers”). Archival coverage extends back as far as 1980 for some of the database newspapers.

Conservative news consumers will welcome access to the Washington Times and the New York Post while liberals will enjoy the availability of the Independent (London) and the Guardian (London). English-language and Spanish-language newspapers are available from 11 countries, and the database is especially strong in its collection of papers from the United Kingdom. “Custom Newspapers” also includes a wealth of local papers from the United States. Papers local to Maryland are the Capital (Annapolis, 2/1/2009-current) and the Frederick News-Post (12/31/2004-current).

Users may search across publications as well as within publications. Publications can be browsed alphabetically, by country of publication, by language, by target audience (general or trade), or by publication subject (e.g. law). Browsing within countries by state or city of publication would be a useful feature if it were provided but, unfortunately, it is not. Database users may set up RSS feeds on news topics with articles delivered either to their email accounts or appearing on their individually configured homepages.

Sailor Database Review: Using Gale’s History Resource Center

A student comes into your branch looking for material on women’s suffrage. Her teacher wants her to use books and magazine articles for her research paper. You readily locate several books using your catalog. Now what? Here’s where Gale’s History Resource Center stands out. Its resources include reference sources, magazines and journals, current news stories, primary sources, maps, and multimedia. Magazines and scholarly journals covered by this database include American Heritage, American History, History Today, Journal of African American History, and Journal of Women’s History.

The History Resource Center is divided into two parts: History Resource Center: World and History Resource Center: US. The search interface allows us to search both databases simultaneously and makes it easy for us to search for either individuals or subjects. Another option is using the advanced mode which allows us to limit our search by time period, date of publication, or document type. For example, we could search the History Resource Center for audio files on the topic of slavery.

You may be interested in examples of reference sources available through the History Resource Center. A search for materials dealing with the Fourth Crusade resulted in articles from the following reference volumes: Dictionary of the Middle Ages, DISCovering World History, History in Dispute, and World Eras. Trying a search for materials discussing the Trail of Tears brought up additional sources such as Americans at War, the Dictionary of American History, Encyclopedia of the American West, and the Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History. If you work at a small or medium-sized branch, the History Resource Center, in effect expands the size of your reference collection.

But now let’s go back to our student researching women’s suffrage. When we search this topic in the History Resource Center: US, our results include reference sources, articles, primary sources, and multimedia. Our customer is particularly interested in primary sources and the History Resource Center makes it easy for us to access quite a few. Among these are the 1890 Constitution of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Dorothy Dix on Women’s Suffrage, and an account of the Proceedings in the Trial of Susan B. Anthony on the Charge of Illegal Voting at the Presidential Election in November 1872.

Gale’s History Resource Center has several additional features. The home page features a chronology useful to students who have to construct timelines. The student research guide clearly defines the difference between primary and secondary sources while offering sound advice on how to write a research paper. If you host school visits, you might want to point out the helpful faculty guide that can provide teachers with questions that will facilitate class discussion of historical topics. With all these assets, Gale’s History Resource Center is definitely worth exploring.

Sailor Database Review: Heritage Quest

The availability of online tools, like the HeritageQuest database from ProQuest, has made genealogy, doing family history research, much easier than it was in the past. Here’s why.

Library customers working on their genealogy rely heavily on documents, the paper trail we all leave as we go through life, to discover important facts about their families, and this is especially true when they are searching for their more distant ancestors. Genealogists look for mention of their relatives in different kinds of documents, like birth, marriage, death, cemetery, and military records, plus directories, census reports, land records, wills, and many others. To locate all the records they need to get a complete picture of their ancestors, they would have to visit lots of different libraries, archives, courthouses, and cemeteries. This is where a genealogy database like HeritageQuest becomes a big time (and gas) saver for them, because it provides access to so many different documents, all in one place.

HeritageQuest offers images of actual documents that will be of interest to beginning family historians, to skilled amateurs, and even to professional genealogists. Using HeritageQuest they can access the U.S. Federal Census (1790-1930), one of the most widely used sets of documents among all genealogists, and an invaluable starting point in family history research. HeritageQuest also makes it possible to search for the names of ancestors in published family history books, in periodicals on genealogy and local history subjects, in Revolutionary War service records, and in records of the Freedman’s Bank (an institution set up by the U. S. government to serve former slaves following the Civil War).

There are a few things to remember about HeritageQuest:

• It’s an alternative resource to Ancestry.com, another genealogy database that is commonly used in libraries for searching the U.S. Federal Census. Most family history researchers will use the census often.
• HeritageQuest also provides access to records of the Freedman’s Bank, an important resource for African American genealogy researchers.
• HeritageQuest is offered to customers of all Maryland public library systems via the Sailor project.
• It is available for use from home, for free, with a library card. That’s another way it differs from Ancestry.com, which must be used from a library facility in order to avoid a fee.

HeritageQuest is easy to use, and you might want to try it out for yourself by searching for some of your own ancestors. Who knows? You could get hooked by the genealogy bug, too!

Sailor Database Review: Books and Authors

Gale’s Books and Authors electronic database replaced Ebsco’s Novelist for Maryland public libraries July 1st. This database is modeled on Gale’s long-standing readers’ advisory print product What Do I Read Next. Books and Authors has several unique features that should be of interest and benefit to customers as well as to library staff. Its “Read-a-Like” wizard enables the user to supply a title that the user has enjoyed, and based on subject, author, or genre criteria that the user specifies, the database will suggest books to read. Its “Who, What, Where, When” feature enables the user to browse books by character, subject, location, and time period. The “My Reading Room” feature lets the user save and modify reading lists, reviews that the user has written, and booklists that the user has created.

Users can search by author, title, keyword, series, or genre, and they can filter by age group (adult, young adult, or children). Non-fiction as well as fiction titles are included. Extensive lists or award winners are included, as well as expert picks, librarian picks, and community picks. There is also an advanced search feature as well as an extensive help feature.

Review: EBSCO History Reference Center

A student comes into your branch looking for material on Women’s Suffrage. Her teacher wants her to use books and magazine articles for her research paper. You readily locate several books using your catalog. Now what? Here’s where the EBSCO History Reference Center stands out. The History Reference Center focuses on the history research needs of 5th through 12th graders. Magazines and scholarly journals covered by this database include American Heritage, American History, Archaeology, Journal of American History, and Smithsonian.

However, this database offers much more than just full text magazine articles. For example, a search for materials dealing with the Fourth Crusade resulted in articles from the following reference sources: Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, Oxford History of the Crusades, Reader’s Companion to Military History, and the Oxford History of Medieval Europe. Oddly enough, the results also included information from H.G. Wells’ Short History of the World, published in 1922. Trying a search for materials discussing the Trail of Tears brought up additional sources such as Reader’s Companion to American History, the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, and the Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History. If you work at a small or medium-sized branch, the History Reference Center, in effect, expands the size of your reference collection.

But wait, that’s not all! Let’s go back to our student researching Women’s Suffrage. When we search this subject in the History Reference Center, we get a list with the following source types: periodicals, newspapers, reference books, biographies, primary source documents, images, and videos. Now we can easily access primary sources such as Samuel J. May’s 1846 sermon on the enfranchisement of women. We can also view images and video footage.

It’s a good idea to spend some time experimenting with the search interface although it’s relatively easy to use. You can limit your search by grade level or by publication date. You can also limit the results to full text articles or by grade level. You can browse and select subjects to search if you choose. With all these assets, the EBSCO History Reference Center is definitely worth exploring.

Sailor Database Review: Novelist

Novelist is an electronic database available through Sailor, which means that every public library in Maryland has access to it. It covers more than 135,000 books and is a lot of fun to explore.

All you need is a favorite title or author to search for similar titles. Novelist also provides subject heading access. Readers can enter words that describe the contents of a book they would like to read, and Novelist retrieves titles that contain these words in the book's subject headings field. This feature is especially useful when working with customers who do not know the author or title of the book that they are looking for but can describe the contents of the novel. It also features reviews, annotations, recommended reads, author read-alikes, book discussion guides, booktalks, and feature articles.

One of its most notable features is its very comprehensive list of award winning fiction in a diverse range of genres, subject areas, and reading levels. This awards feature is especially useful when working with library customers who are looking for notable or award winning books.
Sections of the Novelist database are also specifically geared to young adult as well as children’s literature.

In addition, users can browse over 1,200 theme-oriented book lists, and 1,000 fiction related Web sites.