Today you're going to do some searching using the library's ProQuest database. ProQuest is the library's largest database, and is used for doing scholarly research. It's kind of tricky to get the hang of, so today we'll look at some search strategies and how to filter your search results to get the information that you need.
To access ProQuest, you'll first need to go to the library's website. You can get there through MyPath, or go to the college's website: madisonville.kctcs.edu. Go to "Quick Links" at the top, then "Current Students."
From Current Students, go to "Library."
Now that you're at the library's website, go down to the "Research Databases" tile.
From this page, ProQuest is the first link on there. Be sure to log in with your KCTCS username and password if prompted.
ProQuest is actually a collection of different databases, which is why it says you're searching 6 different ones. One of the databases is an Ebook collection called ProQuest Ebook Central, and one is a streaming video collection called Academic Video Online. If you wanted to search specifically for books or for videos, you can click the tab above the search box for "books" or for "videos & audio." The main database in ProQuest is ProQuest Central, which is a massive database for finding articles from newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. You're probably better off searching the whole thing, so make sure the tab above the search box is set to "All," and make sure the checkbox below the search box is set to "full text."
You're going to focus your search today on disability rights. Just to illustrate how big ProQuest is, I'm going to type in disabilities and we'll see how many results we get.
Over 5 million results. So you can see why it's a good idea to use some search strategies to help you narrow down your search results.
First of all, disabilities is too broad to use as a search term. I'm going to type in disability rights and we'll see what happens.
Now we're down to about 2 million results. If you look at the titles in your search results, it's doing a pretty good job of finding me articles that have disability rights in the title. The problem is, it's searching for the word disability and it's also searching for the word rights.
You can combine the two words into a phrase by putting quotation marks around the two words: "disability rights."
Now we're down to 73 thousand results. In your search results, it's only showing you articles where _disability_ and _rights_ appear next to each other in the title or in the description. So quotation marks are the most useful way to make a narrower search.
The other tip is to combine other words to your phrase. I'm going to type in "disability rights" in quotation marks, AND "education." Now it's going to narrow everything to just dealing with disability rights in education. 31 thousand results.
Take a few minutes to practice this on your own, and then in the next video we'll look at filtering.