CSIS6/LIB6
Research Skills - Lesson 11

More Subscription Databases

What are subscription databases?
Subscription (or limited-access) databases are those commercial collections that are for sale, usually to libraries, and the reason you want to stay connected to libraries, even after you graduate. Just to have access to their subscription databases makes life a whole lot more fun. Says the librarian.

link to the gavilan library

You can get to these databases from the Gavilan Library homepage. Look for the big box of links on the right side of the screen. Each one of those icons will bring you to a different database.

If you're doing this from off-campus, you'll have to log into the Gavilan Library with your password (the first 5 or 6 digits of your library card, whichever the screen tells you).

password box for gavilan library databases
CQ Researcher
CQ Researcher is a great plunge into issues in the news. Reports are published weekly in print and online and are noted for in-depth, unbiased coverage of health, social trends, criminal justice, international affairs, education, the environment, technology, and the economy. When you first log on, CQ Researcher automatically displays their most recent issue. cq researcher search screen

A simple search on CQ Researcher will look for any incident of your term in all the reports over the years. The result screen will show you all those reports that contained your term. For the MRSA search, it looks like CQ published a report called "Fighting Superbugs" in 2007 and another one called "Drug-Resistant Bacteria" in 1999. Let's look at the first, most recent one, Fighting Superbugs.

results for a search on mrsa

Every report is divided into several categories. The Overview will give you a complete description of the issues.

The Background gives a great view of the events that led up to where we are today, including a timeline of major events that shaped the issue in the national conscience.

The Pro/Con section is often very illustrative of different opinions on a subject. CQ finds experts on the two sides of an issue and gives them both an opportunity to explain their opinions.

This particular issue, on superbugs, draws a connection between the drug-resistant infections that we have today and the huge dependency on antibiotics in the animal food industry. Should there be tighter regulatory controls? Do massive uses of antibiotics in beef and chicken factories lead to resistant varieties of bacteria in humans? In this one-page report, you can pick up the arguments on both sides of the discussion.

Try a search on CQResearcher for your own topic. Notice the link at the top of the report page that lets you see a citation for this report.

citenow link on the cq researcher page

mla citation for a cq report

Be sure to click on the MLA style citation to get the format you need for your bibliography project.

Notice that they also include the URL for the site. Remember, in the most recent MLA guidelines for citations, those URLs are no longer required, so you can leave out that part if you want.

You may have noticed that the CQ Researcher database also has an international version, with world-wide issues covered, usually once a month. You should use this if the issue you're researching concerns more than just the United States.
Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center
Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center covers a lot of the same social issues that CQResearcher does. But instead of writing their own report, they collect resources from around the web, such as viewpoint articles, topic overviews, full-text magazine and newspaper articles, primary source documents, statistics, images and podcasts, and links to Websites.

Notice my keyword search for mrsa had no exact matches, but the database still comes up with several hits on the bacteria.

Notice the tabs at the top of the screen.

  • The first is a list of links to opinion pieces about the issue. This is usually a great place to get the different sides of an issue.
  • The second tab has a reference article, kind of like an encyclopedia article, with basic definitions and background information.
  • The Magazine and News tabs have a collection of articles that Opposing Viewpoints has gathered together,
  • and the last tab has multimedia sites - usually an audio or video file, or a slide show.

Opposing Viewpoints also gives you the MLA format for your citation, on the individual article pages. The link will open up a new window, and you'll have to scroll down to see the citation.

History Resource Center

If your topic has anything to do with U.S. history, the Gavilan Library has the database for you. The Gale History Resource Center is an outstanding collection of primary and secondary sources.

search screen for the Gale history resource center

The History Resource Center search engine also supports all the tools we've been using. If I search for orphan train, I'll get a few results, and if I search for orphan trains, I'll get even fewer. But if I use the truncating asterisk, orphan train* , I'll get more than either of those two searches.

result list for history search

The database comes back with very little, but we did get

  • one article from academic journals, and
  • two articles from newspapers

Click on the Academic journals title, "The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America". This is a book review of the book with that title, written by Marilyn Irvin Holt. The review was written by a staff member of The Historian, Peter Holloran. He's not too happy with the author's treatment of Charles Loring Brace, who was in large part responsible for the orphan train movement. Glance through the article (by clicking on the title) and see if you can find some of his criticisms.

The History Resource Center also provides a link to an MLA citation for this article. From the list along the right side of the screen, click on Citation Tools, select MLA format, and you should get a citation that looks like this:

Holloran, Peter. "The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America." The Historian 55.4 (1993): 788+.
Gale U.S. History In Context. Web. 16 Nov. 2010.

You should be able to look at that citation and understand the different parts of it. Such as:

  1. When was the article published?
  2. What page does the article start on?
  3. On what date did I find the article?

 
Learning Express Library
link to the learning express The Learning Express is loaded with practice tests and tutorial courses designed to help you succeed on the academic or licensing tests you must pass. Get immediate scoring, complete answer explanations, and an individualized analysis of results.

link to the learning express

My neighbor's highschool son wants to drop out of school, take his GED exam, and start college now. Because his mother is already a student at Gavilan, he has access to this database that has lots of practice exams that he can try. You can see these practice exams by clicking on the GED Preparation link under the Learning Centers column on the left side of the screen. Click the little triangle next to the GED Practice Exams listing to get the direct links to each test.

list of practice exams and courses

There are U.S. Citizenship exams, admissions and placement preparation, job skills preparation, a career center, and much more.

 

Review

Look again at the Gavilan Library Homepage. There is a wealth of information in those databases, that you have access to because you are a Gavilan student.

Want images from old newspapers and magazines? AP Images is the place for you.

Want information about the country you're going to visit? CountryWatch has not only all the statistics about life expectancy and urban population, but links to the newspapers coming out of the country, and stories that made recent news.

Better yet, see the complete list of all the databases subscribed to by the Gavilan library.

link to library homepage

Most of these databases are fairly straight-forward, offering you either:

  • a search box where you can type in key words or terms,
  • or a subject directory, with a list of topics that they cover.

And many of them will give you a direct link to an MLA or APA citation for the article. Try to get into the habit of looking around the webpage for the link.

As long as you keep your Gavilan library card up-to-date, you can have access to these databases. You can use these databases even after you are no longer taking classes at Gavilan. As part of the community, you can always be a library patron and make use of their databases. There is no cost, but you do have to renew once a year, simply by coming in and showing us a picture i.d. with your current address.

Assignment
  1. Log into the CQ Researcher database and search for bp oilspill. You should be able to find a report that was published in June of this year. Look at the pro/con arguments for this issue, Should offshore drilling continue? Write one sentence that explains the most convincing argument offered by the pro side, and one sentence that explains the most convincing argument from the con side.

  2. Log into the Opposing Viewpoints database and search for the subject words that they use: gulf of mexico oil spill. Click the radio button for entire document (rather than subject or keyword).

    You should get a couple of viewpoint articles, a couple of reference articles, several magazine articles, journal articles, and newspaper articles, and several audio files in the multimedia tab. Look at some of these and describe two. See if you can find one article on each side of the issue. You don't have to write a complete citation, but do tell me what kind of source it is, what is the name of the publication, and the date for each of your two articles.

  3. Log into the History Resource Center and search for offshore drilling.
    You should get a large number of results, including reference articles, news articles, even video and audio files. Glance through a few of these and give me a brief summary of anything new you could learn.

  4. And before we leave this database, try the search on orphan train* again and tell me some of the criticisms made by the reviewer Peter Holloran about the book he's reviewing.

  5. Finally, go into the complete list of databases available through the Gavilan Library website. Are there any other databases in that list that might be useful for your topic?

  6. You can type all your answers into the submission box for this assignment, or you can type them into a word document, save it on your own computer, and copy and paste into the submission box. I highly recommend the second option. You should always save a copy of your submissions. You never know what gremlins might be lurking somewhere along the line of all those computer network systems (yours, Gavilan's, the iLearn system, or mine).

  7. And don't forget to click on the 'save my submission' button.

 

Address of this page:
http://hhh.gavilan.edu/jhowell/lib3/11.htm
For questions or comments, contact Jo Anne Howell at
jhowell@gavilan.edu
Last updated on November 16, 2010