This in class activity helps students slow down and notice the range of information and search tools in a database.
Steps
- Have students navigate to a database of your choosing and have them enter a search term(s) (either of your choosing or of their own choosing, it’s not so important).
- Once the students are viewing a list of results from the database, tell them that they have 3 minutes to look and scroll around the page of results, but that they must not click through to an individual article – this time is for exploring the results page only. Their task is to notice at least 5 things that they can do on the results page.
- After the 3 minutes is up, students can discuss what they found in groups and then have someone from each group come up and write one the board one thing they noticed they could do. Alternatively, you informally invite students to share what they found.
Considerations
- There is a lot going on on these result pages. Examples of things students are likely to come up with for any of the EBSCO databases are:
- access an article
- use citation tools
- change sort order for results
- view the abstract for an article
- limit results to full text
- limit results to a certain date range
- use the chat feature to ask a question
- save the article to a folder for later
- limit results to a particular source type
- The same exercise could be done with an article record. Once students have chosen an article, have them open the record for that article, but not open the pdf and ask them to notice what kinds of information this page provides and what they can do from this page. Likely answers in any EBSCO database:
- get a permalink to the article (students may see this word, but not be clear about what it means.)
- generate a citation to the article
- add it to a folder (students may not be aware that unless they are signed in, the folder contents will disappear if you close the tab)
- listen to the article (being read by an odd AI voice). This feature is available only for articles available in HTML format.
- identify the journal the article came from (it is labeled “source” so this can be a bit confusing for students)
- The same exercise could be done with the page listing all of the Library Databases. Students may click on various parts of the page, but should not navigate through to any of the databases. Of particular relevance on this page are:
- the ability to use the “All Subjects” dropdown menu to identify which databases are recommended for a particular subject.
- the ability to use the “All Database Types” dropdown menu to filter by format (ex: newspapers, video, audio)
- the links to citation management tools.
- Additionally, you could encourage students to identify the database that is most (pick one) interesting, relevant to their major, unusual, etc.