Thanks. And ha ha chipmunks. I wonder if some enterprising regulator would ever look at Proquest as a monopoly. I haven’t read the burn catalogue piece-maybe repost here? I agree article searching is the worst-bc of reviews. I find new Jstor awful to use but maybe a refresher with a librarian would help. I have the grad student desk assistant physically type in all the new books in AHR I highlight and my specialist journals then populate them in running bibs. It’s crazy that this old fashioned way is the workaround. It still doesn’t work for actual articles but I suppose I should be making more of a diligent effort to read once per week.
Thank you for this. I noticed this recently when I had to do a subject search instruction when there was a snafu with scheduling my institution’s librarian. If you are a historian of medicine it’s even more complicated bc those books use the MESH subject headings in some settings. I hadn’t realized that Proquest is the spine of keyword and subject searches for library catalogues and that Proquest uses different subject terms than the LOC or MESH-did I get that right? Is there variation between institutions? Ivies catalogues and big cross-systems like the UCs using a better keyword/cataloging system than say a SLAC or an R2? To familiarize my students with subject terms (and to populate them) I always have them do a discovery assignment/homework. I give them a handout that asks them to plug in one of the books for our class in an Ivy’s catalogue (bc they have more books on hand) and Worldcat, see what subject terms this yields and then have them find five more books or articles using variations on those subject terms. It was somewhat useful-at the very least it got them to do this on their own outside of a library instruction session. Outside of Amazon, have the changes you wrote about here (the takeover by Proquest) occurred in approximately the last 5 years or so?
Thanks. And ha ha chipmunks. I wonder if some enterprising regulator would ever look at Proquest as a monopoly. I haven’t read the burn catalogue piece-maybe repost here? I agree article searching is the worst-bc of reviews. I find new Jstor awful to use but maybe a refresher with a librarian would help. I have the grad student desk assistant physically type in all the new books in AHR I highlight and my specialist journals then populate them in running bibs. It’s crazy that this old fashioned way is the workaround. It still doesn’t work for actual articles but I suppose I should be making more of a diligent effort to read once per week.
Thank you for this. I noticed this recently when I had to do a subject search instruction when there was a snafu with scheduling my institution’s librarian. If you are a historian of medicine it’s even more complicated bc those books use the MESH subject headings in some settings. I hadn’t realized that Proquest is the spine of keyword and subject searches for library catalogues and that Proquest uses different subject terms than the LOC or MESH-did I get that right? Is there variation between institutions? Ivies catalogues and big cross-systems like the UCs using a better keyword/cataloging system than say a SLAC or an R2? To familiarize my students with subject terms (and to populate them) I always have them do a discovery assignment/homework. I give them a handout that asks them to plug in one of the books for our class in an Ivy’s catalogue (bc they have more books on hand) and Worldcat, see what subject terms this yields and then have them find five more books or articles using variations on those subject terms. It was somewhat useful-at the very least it got them to do this on their own outside of a library instruction session. Outside of Amazon, have the changes you wrote about here (the takeover by Proquest) occurred in approximately the last 5 years or so?