Proquest

Searching Les Miserables, the basic search in full text gave me 6244 results which is a lot to sort through.  When looking at the limiters on the right, I can narrow my results through a variety of combinations under document type and subject.  Just looking at documents after the first basic full text search there were:  articles 2717, feature 2105, general information 934, review 698 and news 640.  When I selected more options, I then found how to exclude reviews but include the other limiters.  I was then able to exclude document types that would contain reviews.  There were many document types , such as: article, feature, general information, review, news, undefined, commentary, interview, transcript, report, fiction, front page/cover story, blog, obituary, correspondence, editorial, biography, case study, poem, statistics/data report, speech/lecture, conference, correction/retraction, directory, instructional material/guideline and market research.  By expanding the subject limiter, the results showed: theater 344, literary criticism 316, nonfiction 305, history 301, and musical theater 281.  By selecting the more options the list was expanded to include many more subject limiters, too numerous to list here.   This option also allowed me to include and exclude subjects to the researcher’s parameters.  Using the limiters, I selected literary criticism, novels, studies, books, and literature under subject.  I selected article, feature, general information and biography under the limiter, document type.  I still had 454 results.  I then used only literary criticism under subject and excluded anything that had an entertainment aspect and came down to 211 results.  Looking at the results I started over and put Les Miserables in quotations marks and then chose the limiters again and was able to narrow my results to 23.  This would be a great topic for older students and adults but the articles were probably too difficult for my middle school students on average.

 

For the next question, I used the advanced search for Hurricane Sandy and libraries.  This first search resulted in 1001 results. When I looked to the document type limiter, I noticed that there were 88 results under reports and selected this.  This number of results was still a lot to go through, so I then looked under subjects and found disasters and damage.  Under damage there were 5 results and started looking through those.  I did like that throughout the articles I looked at, my search terms were highlighted.  Hurricane Sandy was easy to find and I found that libraries were not highlighted as often.  So far the results are thin.  When libraries were mentioned it was often in conjunction with hospitals, museums, and college campuses and trying to provide funding to rebuild them.  I did find one article where the library was a collection point for donations in the community.  I did notice there was an indexing details at the bottom of the article with other subjects descriptors that I could explore.

I then tried a different document type, articles rather than reports and kept the subject of disasters.  I did find an interesting article that wrote of the libraries roles in disasters, but it contained an older publication date.

Featherstone, R. M., M.L.S., Lyon, B. J., M.L.S., & Ruffin, A. B. (2008). Library roles in disaster response: An oral history project by the national library of Medicine*dagger]. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 96(4), 343-50. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/203478503?accountid=45583

I then tried Libraries and Hurricance Sandy and used the limiters articles and libraries.  This seemed to have had the best results when focusing on impact.  Though damage was mentioned many spoke to the importance of an operational library to a community.  I became a bit frustrated in my search and will be checking other blogs to see what they found.  Most articles I found focused on the aspect of the hurricane (and some mention Katrina) and others focused on libraries with little mention to the hurricane.  I found articles published in 2013 but were not focused on the impact of the subjects searched.