Proquest- wk 4

1. This week I chose Meniere's Disease as my topic of interest because my sister has been diagnosed with it and my brother suffers with tinnitus which can be an accompanying symptom.
I clicked on "Health and Medicine" as seemed the logical place to start. There were only 2 databases with 48 results but I soon realized all of them contained the word disease and not Menieres. I deleted the word, disease, and was presented with 0 results. I went back to the general search box and typed in "Menieres" and got 45 articles referring to my topic. I like the fact you can narrow down your search by choosing scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines, trade journals, wire feeds or reports and also by relevance so you don't drown in information. I chose to sort by the most recent publication date. I quickly found out the scholarly journals are a bit too "scholarly" for me to understand as the articles are full of very scientific terminology. I did look into one of "those" articles describing the inheritance of Meniere's disease in the Finnish population. This was of interest to me since my grandfather, as you may remember, emigrated here from Finland. I will email these findings to my sister and my brother. I tried emailing it to myself first and yes, it did work. I also like the highlighting feature. It saved me time when looking through a lengthy article if the whole thing was not just about Menieres. I created an alert, checked my e-mail and confirmed I actually wanted any current information for the next month. If you expand the "date" under source types a chart comes up showing you the amount of articles available for specific years if you run your cursor over it. You can click on the chart bars and the articles for that particular year pops up. You can also create an account to save all your searches and articles for mulling over later. This site is well equipped for an older audience.
There are so many ways of searching in Proquest as there are in all the databases we have explored to this point.
2. I did look into several of the other blogs. My boys would call this "creeping" but since we were asked to do it I don't feel as much like a "creeper." Some have only completed 2 weeks of lessons or maybe none at all. Makes me feel not so bad about getting my work done on Sundays. I think we are all agreeing on the vast amount of information available and can see the searches are a bit more difficult according to what age group they are intended for.  It is wonderful to discover something new from the posts as obviously we can't go into every aspect of the site. I like the posts where the blogger's personality seeps through. Makes me think they are enjoying the exercises.
3. Thought I would check "Public Servant" from Publications tab but there were no results. I tried the word "library" and 73 were available. I also checked "Postal" but got nothing again and the same for just the words "post office." Diabetes had 6 so I did look into a couple of them. It is nice to see the table of contents of these magazines to insure you picked the correct one and what all it has to offer.
Apparently there are a lot of magazines/publications to pick from so I clicked into a couple of letters in the alphabetical listing to see exactly what was there. Out of curiosity I checked out the "Obituaries" but wasn't very successful finding a relative. It was easier to get results using famous people. Thought it might be another avenue for those genealogy researchers.
Happy Super Bowl.