Proquest

The first task on Proquest was to look up something that interests me. I work with teen programming at my library and so I chose to look up the topic "Teens and the Library".  I was suprised to find so many articles about the topic come up! I only had time to browse but I did see some good programming and grant ideas as well as articles on how to get teens more involved at your library.

The second task is to look at someone else's blog. I just chose the first one, Faith library. I looked at their proquest post and noticed they talked about not having time to keep up with the blogs, but I quickly realized they are two ahead of me :) I browsed around and found on one of the posts they are planning on doing a newspaper article and are going to be offering a class to the public on learning more about the databases and how to use them. I thought that is a really good use of what we are learning in this class. 

The third and final task was to look up a topic under publications. I used the word library and found there are many journals with the topic available, for example The Booklist. I know we carry a monthly copy of The Booklist at our Main library, but for readers who are not able to get there to read it or check it out it is a great way to let people know it is still available to them at any of our locations on the computer or even at home.

Databases like Proquest are a great way to get research articles for writing papers or just for patrons interested in certain topics and like reading journals. I remember as a college student having to search through stacks and files of journals in order to find the article I wanted. This is definately a much easier, more efficient ( not to mention greener ) way to look up journal articles.