What a wealth of information on hobbies and crafts! Although I already knew about this database, I haven't taken the time to explore it; now I'll be telling my friends about it.
I started out looking at the Browse by Category for Outdoor and Nature. I looked at Canoe and Kayak articles for basic "How to" information for a friend. I found several articles that worked for this purpose. I noticed that some of the PDF's were difficult to read on the screen. When I enlarged them, only the Hobbies and Crafts background enlarged, not the article. So, I tried printing it, hoping I would be able to read the print out - no such luck. Anyway, this was not the case with all of the articles, just some of them.
The magazines represented by these articles were; Canoe and Kayak, Kayaking, and Wooden Boat. I receive none of them in my libraries. It also accessed some really good books and gave links to the appropriate chapters. For a project, it offered several (real) boat making projects, however I found one I could make - a canoe from the "Little Book of Whittling."
I also looked for information on "Penny quilts," but was finding mostly quilting articles. Not sure how to narrow this search, I used Google and searched the same two words. Many of the hits on Google were entitled "Penny Rug Quilts" and when I searched for these terms on "Hobbies and Crafts" I found articles on this very narrow topic. But again, many were hard to read because of gray text color and printing did not improve it. This would be good feedback for the producers of "Hobbies and Crafts." I wonder if is the "core, proprietary articles" that are in gray text.
The "Help" had lots of information. I watched the video about Hobbies and Crafts which had a little different information from the MARVEL video. I looked up "Field Codes" because I didn't know what that was. As it turned out, it is using the codes that are in the drop down menu to the right in all the Ebsco databases "advanced search" pages, such as SU-Subject, AU-Author or TI- Article_Title.
My library, too, subscribes to this database, but I hadn't had much time to explore it before now. So many resources, so little time!
ReplyDeleteYou also raise a good point about the images. For a database dealing heavily in visual subject matter, one would expect more of the graphics to be preserved. One of the articles mentioned in my post was an html with the images stripped away.