While you were away in January skiing in Switzerland or snorkeling in Aruba or slaving away 50 hours a week at your dad’s company to pay for next semester, we at the library have been coming up with a lot of new things.  I’ll spend the next few blog posts revealing the new and the fancy.

First and foremost was a change of look and function in over 30 library databases.  You may be familiar with the brand Proquest.  It used to look like this: 

Or maybe you were used to using CSA which looked like this:

But now if you do a search in

• ABI/Inform
• American Periodical Series
• Applied Social Science Index
• British Periodicals
• Computer & Information Systems Abstracts
• Criminal Justice Abstracts
• Econlit
• ERIC
• Ethnic Newswatch
• GeoRef
• National Criminal Justice Reference Service
• Physical Education Index
• PILOTS
• Proquest Civil War Era
• Proquest Historical Newspapers
• Proquest Newsstand
• PsycArticles
• PsycBooks
• Social Service Abstracts
• Sociological Abstracts

They will now look like this:

The big deal isn’t so much how it looks, but how it works.  Now when you get results in a Proquest database, you’ll be able to do a ton of new things. You can combine several (or all) Proquest databases to search them only once. This would be great for all the sociology/social science databases.  Another thing you can do is limit by source type.  Let’s say you only want scholarly journals on a topic.  Boom!  Limited to only scholarly journals with the click of a mouse.  Some of the best new features come in the form of MY RESEARCH.

• View your selected items
• Create a bibliography
• View and combine your recent searches
• Print, email and save items
• Export to a citation management tool

Learn more…

• Save articles, images and searches
• Organize your research with folders
• Add tags and create lists to share
• Set ProQuest preferences
• Manage your alerts and RSS feeds

Sign in or Create an account

Add items to RefWorks with a single click. You can connect your account to My Research during sign-up or any time after. When you do, have your RefWorks login information ready.

Learn more…

That’s the first of 3 installments of what’s new with library databases.  I’m sure you’re just on the EDGE of your seat waiting to hear what else we did.