Saturday, March 12, 2016

Some ideas for searching help ....


Just posting a few links that lead to much more:

One is Illume Learning which I first came across in an email.  This site makes me think of open educational resources and the efforts to make those more widely available.  Illume Learning is the result of a collaboration between founders Peter Quandt and Justin Irizarry.  On the site, one can search for key terms in a wide variety of sources (books, periodicals, even syllabi and lectures or Khan Academy).  I have shown this to other librarians and we want to spend more time investigating this currently free source.   

My first impressions center on the amount of material that is available – almost too much to efficiently search. The filters (e.g., choose a newspaper name or date range) and advanced searching (add a second term) appear to only work sometimes or in certain patterns but not in others. Although the site may still be under development, it has some exciting potential. This video will give you an idea of the range of sources:

In the meantime, I often turn to the Libguides Community to find ideas of links related to new projects and topics.  The search function could be improved there, too, by allowing for a search of multiple terms and adding K-8 and 9-12 subcategories. Increasingly, it seems that only version1 Libguides are available and that should definitely be addressed.
http://journalistsresource.org/tip-sheets/reporting/polling-fundamentals-journalists

Saving what is arguably the best for last, here is a link to another favorite, the Journalist’s Resource, a project of the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative, which recently posted about “Reporting with Web and Social Media Data.” Last Fall, they also offered a timely pre-election review of “Polling Fundamentals and Concepts.”  Our journalism teachers and student researchers turn to this well-regarded site on a regular basis.