EBSCO

I started my research using EBSCO through MNSU library.  The search terms I could think of at first were library, minority, and diversity.  I went to the advanced search page, and in the first box typed in “library” and in the second box typed in “minority or diversity”.  Unlike a few years ago, it brought up a lot of articles.  Even though it still couldn’t filter out articles about bio-diversity or crop diversity, I thought the search results were pretty good.  Skimming through the articles, I noticed that the subjects of them include “multicultural” and “immigrants”.  Those two seemed to be very good subject terms.  So I started a new search adding these two terms in the second box and connecting all of them with “OR”s.  This time it brought up even more articles than the first search.  I believe there were more than 300 of them.

The next step was to sort out the articles and to save relevant ones separately in My Folder in EBSCO. Sometimes, looking at the title was sufficient to figure out what the article was about, but often they had very obscure titles.  In this case, I had to check the abstract.  I found that EBSCO had a very convenient feature for this purpose.  At the end of every title, you can see a picture of a magnifying glass on a document.  If you place your mouse on it, it opens a pop-up window that shows all the useful information about the article such as date, subjects, and abstract.

In the end, I could save about 80 articles in My Folder.  But now I have to figure out how many of them are available in full text through the library.  That will be my next task – finding out their availability, and if not available, deciding on whether or not to request them through inter-library loan.