And welcome to Week 6 – Today, we’ll begin a two part look at one of our primary tools, the EBSCO databases. Academic Search Premier is our largest and most diversified database, and is the default starting point for nearly everything we do, the database automatically selected from the library home page, so it’s a good idea to take a look at it. I know that we’re all familiar with the basics of EBSCO, so thought we’d take a look at some of the more hidden things.
In our first part, let’s look at customization. There is an interesting tool called My EBSCOhost that allows for some interesting alternatives. My EBSCOhost allows a valid user to create a personal log in, which offers some interesting possibilities. First, once you’ve created a login of your own, using the top ribbon and choosing the link “Sign in to My EBSCOhost” it will ask you to log in, or to create your own account… do that now, please, we’ll wait……………………………………
OK, welcome back. Once you’ve created your account and logged into it, you’ll see, right under the search boxes, the word preferences. This allows you to make some changes that persist over time, so they don’t have to be adjusted every time. Things like automatically putting in yo
ur email address, changing the citation type, APA, MLA, etc. and adjusting the results per page. It also allows you to set up an automatic export to EndNote, a citation management tool available on campus, which we’ll talk about later.These are pretty simple changes, but they’re a beginning for the more interesting parts. Once you’re logged in, if you add articles or citations to your own folder, they stay in the folder over multiple sessions. That means that you can easily add things to come back to later. Students particularly like this feature, as it means that they can print when it’s convenient, or add to research when time allows.
It also means that a faculty member or students working in groups can create a folder that can be shared [as long as they share the email address + password]. That makes group work and class readings a lot easier to manage, but you have to know it’s there!
For this week, let’s get individual accounts set up, and write a quick blog entry about the differences in the preferences, and if there are any interesting things you observe, or ideas that you have about how we could use this.
Also, if you liked the concept map in Credo Reference, take a minute or two to look at the Visual Search interface in Ebsco – it’s quite different, but does offer some interesting ways to look at your results, and some interesting ways to limit them.
Next Week - My EBSCOhost part two, the cool stuff: automatic searches and RSS feeds
trivia time: what does EBSCO stand for?
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