ProQuest

My husband and I are in the process of purchasing our first house. So my first search was for "home ownership." I checked the "full text documents only" box to narrow my results. I was hoping for a few articles about tips about what kinds of inspections to have done, hidden costs to watch out for, etc. With the current state of our economy and the concurrent housing crisis, I should have known I wouldn't get anything useful. After 10 pages of nothing that I was looking for, I decided there wouldn't be much to blog about.

My next search was for "adolescent brain." This yielded much better results (in terms of usefulness). I just love everything about ProQuest: how it helps me expand or narrow my search (Suggested Topics About), how I can take my search results and save them for later by emailing them, the citation builder, etc. Though I've never used it, I appreciate the RSS feed and Alert features. I find ProQuest easy to navigate and well laid out. I've also used the Advanced search many times to look for book reviews. A shout out goes to Jean Peterson in Tech Services for showing me how to do that my second day on the job!

I've used the Publications tab many times to search for a specific article I've seen in a print version of a magazine. For the heck of it I tracked down the issue of American Libraries that came out right before the 2006 annual conference in New Orleans. My mom wrote a French Quarter restaurant guide for that issue and I always enjoy reading it. Maybe that's cheating, but I don't care :)