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Resource of the Week

October 23, 2007

In the First Person

In the First Person is an index to English language personal narratives, including letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories. Some are available on the web, some through UNLV's subscriptions to Alexander Street Press collections, and some are held by repositories and archives around the world.

Perform in-depth field and keyword searches within Alexander Street Press databases and more than 700,000 pages of editorially selected materials spanning 400 years. This collection contains full-text narratives by more than 18000 individuals from all walks of life.


Search tips:

  • You can full-text search this database and search for specific words or phrases that occur within the texts. When full-text searching you can use the standard Boolean operators, AND, OR, NOT in the following manner:
    • The OR operator is capital OR. So "Slavery OR Prostitution" retrieves materials that contain either of the words 'slavery' or 'prostitution (e.g., slavery OR prostitution). A lower case "or" will retrieve the exact phrase. E.g. if you enter "Black or White" you will retrieve materials that contain the phrase "black or white".
    • The AND operator is capital AND. So if you enter "girl AND education" retrieves materials that contain both the words 'girl' and 'education'.
    • The NOT operator is capital NOT. If you enter "cigar NOT smoke" you will retrieve texts that contain the word 'cigar' but not 'smoke', 'smokes', or 'smokers.'
  • When full text searching, search punctuation in the following manner:
    • Hyphens: Hyphens act as word separators. Thus, you should treat hyphenated expressions as separate words excluding the hyphen (e.g., if searching for all-powerful, type in all powerful).
    • Apostrophes: You must include apostrophes when searching words with apostrophes in them (e.g., only by typing God's will one find "God's"). In this database apostrophes do not act as word separators. Therefore contractions and elisions must be entered without spaces before or after the apostrophe.
    • Ampersands: The ampersand (&) is not a searchable character. Avoid Phrase Searches where an ampersand may be used as a conjunction and realize that &c must be entered as simply c.

  • The standard truncation character for this database is the asterisk *. It can be used at the end of any string to retrieve a endings of various lengths. For example, cigar* will retrieve cigar, cigars, cigarette, etc.

Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter I and select In the First Person.

Quick Link: http://www.inthefirstperson.com/firp/index.shtml

Posted by Shelley Heaton on October 23, 2007 3:30 PM |

October 8, 2007

Factiva

Factiva has coverage of the full text of all editions of Dow Jones publications, the Wall Street Journal and Barron's, plus the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and three months of the New York Times. Factiva also includes over 2100 newspapers from all over the world, 3500 business and industry magazines, 500 newswires, 280 television news transcripts, 27,000 company reports and 12,000 editorially selected business websites. Included are publications in 22 languages from 159 countries and 350 geographic regions.

Search tips:

  • It is possible to change the language of the search interface from English to Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, or Russian. To do this click on the words Language Interface in the gray bar at the top of the search page and select your preferred language. This will not change the original language of the search results, but will allow you to see search commands in a language other than English.

  • To search for all publications in a particular language:
    1. click on the plus sign by the word source on the search page.
    2. Then use the drop down menu by the words select source list.
    3. Once in the list, select publications by language.
    4. And finally, click on your language of choice from the list. This will restrict your search to only publications in that language.

  • Factiva uses several different truncation symbols depending on the circumstances. The dollar sign is used at the end of an entry. At least three characters must be entered before the dollar sign. Values for N can be entered from 1 - 9. If no number is included after the dollar sign, then N is assumed to be 5. For example, searching product$
    retrieves the following terms:
      • product
      • products
      • production
      • productive
      • productivity

    Note: It will not retrieve the term productiveness because this term is 7 characters beyond the stem. Extend the stem word and search like this to get it: productive$4 to retrieve articles with the term productiveness.

    The asterisk is used at the end of a term. A minimum of three characters must be entered before the asterisk. No values should be entered after the asterisk. There is no limit to the number of characters after the stem word that will be searched. For example, searching: cat* will retrieve terms such as the following:

      • cat
      • cats
      • category
      • catastrophe

    The question mark is used as a single wildcard character. A minimum of three characters must be entered before the question mark. Letters can be entered after the question mark. For example, searching on: globali?ation retrieves the following terms:

      • globalization
      • globalisation

    The percent sign is used as a wildcard character for phrase searching. It requires that exactly one term must appear between the two search terms. The percent sign can only be used as an "inner" term in phrase searching; it cannot be used as the first or last term of the phrase. For example, searching Dun % Bradstreet
    would retrieve articles that contain any of the following:

      • Dun and Bradstreet
      • Dun & Bradstreet

    The % is very useful for searching for articles mentioning web site addresses with a specific domain. Searching www % info will retrieve articles that mention web sites using the .INFO domain name, such as:

      • www.afilias.info
      • www.stresscongress.info
      • www.austech.info

    Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter F and select Factiva.

    Quick Link: http://global.factiva.com/sb/default.aspx?NAPC=S&fcpil=en

    • Posted by Shelley Heaton on October 8, 2007 5:08 PM |

    October 4, 2007

    Alt Health Watch

    The Alt HealthWatch database focuses on the many perspectives of complementary, holistic and integrated approaches to health care and wellness. It offers full-text articles for nearly 180 international -- and often peer-reviewed -- journals and reports. In addition, there are hundreds of pamphlets, booklets, special reports, original research and book excerpts. Full-text titles include:

    • American Journal of Chinese Medicine
    • American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine
    • California Journal of Oriental Medicine
    • European Journal of Clinical Hypnosis
    • International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms
    • Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine
    • Journal of Asian Natural Products Research
    • Journal of the Australian Traditional-Medicine Society
    • Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association
    • and many others.

    Alt HealthWatch provides in-depth coverage across the full spectrum of subject areas covered by complementary and alternative medicine.

    Search tips:

  • If you are interested in saving items related to searching (for example, search results, saved searches, etc.) you can create an account. Once you sign in as a personalized user, any items that you collect are automatically saved to your folder for future use. To do this click on the words Sign In at the top of the page. On the next screen, select I’m a new user. You will be prompted to fill in your information to create the account. Then you will always be able to log into this account from any computer and access anything you have saved.

  • The wildcard is represented by a question mark ?. To use the wildcard, enter your search terms and replace each unknown character with a ?. Alt Health Watch finds all citations of that word with the ? replaced by a letter. For example, type ne?t to find all citations containing neat, nest or next. It will not find net because the wildcard replaces a single character. Truncation is represented by an asterisk (*). To use truncation, enter the root of a search term and replace the ending with an * . Alt Health Watch finds all forms of that word. For example, type comput* to find the words computer or computing.

  • To change your view of the search results click on the word Preferences located at the top of the page. Here, you can change the number of citations you will see on a page, from the default 10 up to a maximum of 50. You can also change the citation format to either a brief format or a detailed one that includes abstracts when available.

    Where is it: Go to the UNLV Libraries' home page http://www.library.unlv.edu. Select the Articles and Databases tab, click on the A-Z List of Databases and then on the letter A and select Alt Health Watch.

    Quick Link: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,uid&profile=ehost&defaultdb=awh

    • Posted by Shelley Heaton on October 4, 2007 5:03 PM |