Lesson 5-South Dakota Library Challenge

Proquest Research and Discovery Library

Basic Discovery Exercise

 1. Do a basic search on something of interest to you. Report your findings and observations.

I chose to search for "Coconut Oil."   After seeing 11,229 hits I opted to narrow the search for specifically "Coconut Oil Benefits."   The new search showed 2541 articles.   Having just purchased my first jar of "Coconut Oil" after a friend raved of its many uses, what I wanted to know is how many uses there are I hadn't yet heard of.   I was able to easily scan down the list until an article from "Women's Fitness" Summer of 2014 article caught my eye.   It was titled, "Join the Coconut Craze."  What I really liked was how it first gave the summary so I could see if it was actually of interest and then went into the full text.  As I suspected, the coconut has many uses and is now taking center stage as a super food.   It explained benefits from the kitchen to the makeup bag.  

 1.a. See what your Challenge cohort is discovering. Choose at least one other Challenge blog, read that person's post (about this or a previous lesson), and comment on it. You may like to check each other's blogs throughout the Challenge as you learn together.

Since the beginning of the challenge, I have been checking the blogs of others also doing the challenge.  Mostly because I had never worked with a blog and wanted to verify I was on the right track.   One of the first ones I checked today was "Crazy Librarian Lady."  Of course I was drawn to the name because that is totally my sense of humor.  I loved her page design as much as her name.   I was so surprised to see her comment complimenting my page.  However, I was unable to figure out how to comment on hers.  She is further along on the challenge than myself...and looks to be doing great. 

 2. Click the Publications tab at the top of the page. You will see an alphabetical list of the periodicals indexed in Proquest and the years included. Notice that this list is "Full text only." Do a search for a journal in your profession by typing a title or keyword in the search box. Report your findings and observations.

I am the IT Coordinator for our Library so I chose to search "Library Technology" in the search box.  I noticed a drop down arrow allowed  more specific searches by changing between; in title, title begins with, in publication summary or in subject.  I first left it to the default "in title."   Only 2 articles were found so I changed to the "in subject." In this case, it made no change to the search.