Tuesday, December 13, 2011
ICONN Resources
One of the great things about being a college student at BU was how much information I got to access through the University Library. The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center had hundreds of amazing artifacts and pieces of historical literature for students to examine. And when you logged into the library website, you could search for books, articles, journals, magazines, any scholarly material really, through extensive databases...the database for Mugar Library itself, and third-party databases like LION, and my personal favorite, JSTOR. If I wanted to find academic articles on any topic related to English Literature, I went to JSTOR and was never disappointed.
ICONN.org is the Connecticut State Library database, and is very similar to the database at BU and on other college campuses. All you need is a library card number to log into the digital library, and you're taken to a page where you can access at least two dozen databases (infotrac) to search for materials. There are databases for specific topics like fine arts, business, and the environment. One of my favorite databases is Academic OneFile, since it reminds me so much of JSTOR. On Academic OneFile, you can find, "peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources...with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects." I typed in a few random search topics like "Walt Whitman and the Civil War," on Academic OneFile, but I was disappointed when few full-length articles appeared. Many of the search findings were excerpts from Publisher's Weekly, or book reviews of books about Whitman in the Civil War. I'd therefore have to search for these books somewhere else to get any real information. I did find some full-length articles, but not nearly as many as I would find on JSTOR or databases like it.
So while Academic OneFile was slightly disappointing for me, if you're a Connecticut high school or middle school student, and you want to do research on the Civil War, chances are you'll find a lot of great articles on Academic OneFile. There's also a General OneFile, but I don't see much difference between the two.
It's so important that students have access to online databases like this, because it's the quickest and most user-friendly way to get reliable information about academic topics. Students don't need Wikipedia when they can use databases like Academic OneFile. Many students wouldn't know where to look for this information if they didn't have a database search engine to do it for them. When I was doing a research paper on Walt Whitman, JSTOR was a life-saver because I didn't know who the Whitman scholars were, and I didn't know which academic journals I should read to find information about the poet. Another great thing about Academic OneFile is you can access articles from the New York Times and other publications for free, when you'd normally have to pay for a membership to read them online.
ICONN.org is the Connecticut State Library database, and is very similar to the database at BU and on other college campuses. All you need is a library card number to log into the digital library, and you're taken to a page where you can access at least two dozen databases (infotrac) to search for materials. There are databases for specific topics like fine arts, business, and the environment. One of my favorite databases is Academic OneFile, since it reminds me so much of JSTOR. On Academic OneFile, you can find, "peer-reviewed, full-text articles from the world's leading journals and reference sources...with extensive coverage of the physical sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences, the arts, theology, literature and other subjects." I typed in a few random search topics like "Walt Whitman and the Civil War," on Academic OneFile, but I was disappointed when few full-length articles appeared. Many of the search findings were excerpts from Publisher's Weekly, or book reviews of books about Whitman in the Civil War. I'd therefore have to search for these books somewhere else to get any real information. I did find some full-length articles, but not nearly as many as I would find on JSTOR or databases like it.
So while Academic OneFile was slightly disappointing for me, if you're a Connecticut high school or middle school student, and you want to do research on the Civil War, chances are you'll find a lot of great articles on Academic OneFile. There's also a General OneFile, but I don't see much difference between the two.
It's so important that students have access to online databases like this, because it's the quickest and most user-friendly way to get reliable information about academic topics. Students don't need Wikipedia when they can use databases like Academic OneFile. Many students wouldn't know where to look for this information if they didn't have a database search engine to do it for them. When I was doing a research paper on Walt Whitman, JSTOR was a life-saver because I didn't know who the Whitman scholars were, and I didn't know which academic journals I should read to find information about the poet. Another great thing about Academic OneFile is you can access articles from the New York Times and other publications for free, when you'd normally have to pay for a membership to read them online.
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