You Can't Google This!

A quick overview of the online databases offered by the Arlington Heights Memorial Library

Transcript

1. A Quick Overview of AHML’s Databases Bill Pardue Arlington Heights Memorial Library bpardue@ahml.info
2. What Google Does  Visits hundreds of millions of webpages and creates an index  Licenses selected content and learns how to give it priority over “natural” results. (Weather, stocks, flight info)  A few cool computational tricks (calculator/converter)
3. What Google DOESN’T Do  Find “hidden” content that’s the result of searches in databases.  Get information that’s only available to subscribers (it may link…but you can’t read without paying!)  Find historical information that hasn’t been made easily available to the whole web.
4. “Hidden” Content  Content that only appears as the result of a search…it’s not just “browsable.”  The AHML catalog  Kelley Blue Book Car Values  Illinois Sec. of State business search (URL never changes).
5. What to do?  Try searching google more conceptually (“car prices” instead of “1987 Ford Escort with 235,000 miles”)  You still need to know specific sources for specific jobs.  That’s where the library comes in handy!
6. The “Databases” page  Look for Research/Databases on our menus  Leads you to dozens of premium websites for looking up articles, investment info, health info, etc.  Most are available from home/office (with your AHML username & password)
7. Articles  Use the Magazine/Newspaper articles category…or start with the pink box!  Finds articles from approximately 85% of our full-text journals, across multiple databases.  Includes some info “beyond” our databases.
8. Articles (cont’d)  Try looking at specific resources  Use the Magazine Articles or Newspaper Articles categories.  You may need to skip from source to source.
9. Articles (cont’d)  Top tools:  Academic Search Premier  MasterFile Premier  Student Resources In Context  Lexis/Nexis Library Express
10. Genealogy  Use the Genealogy category  Ancestry Library Edition (in-library only)  HeritageQuest  America’s Obituaries & Death Notices
11. Business Tools  Use the Business category.  Top tools:  ReferenceUSA: massive phone/business directory  Business Source Premier  Lexis/Nexis Company Dossier
12. Investment Tools  Use the Investments Category:  MorningStar  ValueLine  Standard & Poor’s
13. Health Tools  Use the Health category.  Health & Wellness Resource Center  Consumer’s Checkbook
14. Miscellaneous!  P4A (antique prices)  Alldata/Chilton Library (auto repair)  Mango/Visual Thesaurus (language skills)
15. Need help? Contact us! (Google can’t do that, either…)  Call (847-392-0100)  Visit  Chat help 24/7