Hypothetical web updates

Another day (yesterday actually), another group of author/illustrator web page updates are finished. Alphabetically speaking, it was with resounding relief I moved out of the "p's" and into the "s's." The latest group includes Philip Pullman, Chris Raschka, Margret Rey, Faith Ringgold, JK Rowling, Cynthia Rylant, Louis Sachar, Robert Sansouci, Jon Scieszka, and Maurice Sendak. Researching article resources for each of the authors I am finding a few quirks, oddities, and general weirdness in several of the EbscoHost databases.

Utilizing the "choose database" option, I am doing quick surface searches in several different ebsco databases at the same time. As previously mentioned, I have selected academic search premier, education research complete, professional development collection, library and technology abstracts with full text, and in some cases master file premier (sometimes useful) for interviews with the authors, articles written by the authors, and general information. Boolean, rather "advance searches have proved particularly successful as I am able to declare not and review to weed out the plethora of book reviews included in academic search premier. Here are some of the unusual occurrances; some of them are definitely a cataloger or indexers nightmare:

• Searchin for Christopher Raschka, I was only able to get results with Chris instead of Christopher.
• Searching for Robert San Souci, I had to use Robert D. San Souci.
• There were only popular magazine references, as opposed to academic journals, available for J.K. Rowling. It will obviously take time for her work to be considered literature as opposed to popular fiction.
• When searching, different results were returned when searching first name and last name than when searching using last name, first name.
• Instead of limiters returning fewer hits, hence the term limiter, the returned more results than broad searching.
• The actual number of results often changed when I began going through them one at a time. For example, a query for a particular author detailed 158 results on the main list. I clicked on the first article for additional information and instead of seeing article 1 of 158, it said article 1 of 49. (What's up with that?)

I am a fan of the ebsco databases, mostly because they do provide pretty instant results for students. We have to get a bit of immediate success to prove the database has better information than google before moving on with many a reference interview. But if I had not known to try different variations of an author or illustrators name, several of them would not have had article resources listed. And we wonder why students would rather search the internet than a database?

Lastly, did you know that the word database and/or databases can be typed using only your left hand? Something I realized after typing the word databases on each and every one of the author information pages.

Tags: Web design, Database searching, Database oddities