EbscoHost

Academic Search Complete is my favorite database for research. I used it extensively for my graduate work. Recently I have been reading Bill Bryson's "Home" and became intrigued by Skara Brae, a 5000 year old village that was unearthed in Orkney, Scotland. I knew I was looking for historic information and browsed the publications looking for something that started with history or British. I found British Heritage Journal as well as the popular Time Magazine. In the basic search I entered "skara brae" and got 24 results. The first was great because it was written in a tour guide fashion. However, many of the other articles only had the "Article Linker" that always leads to nothing, "Sorry no holdings were found for this journal." If anyone else has success with the "Article Linker" please let me know what you are doing that leads to success.

Ebsco eBooks search on "Skara Brae" yielded nothing, so I tried "British History" and got 107 hits, I narrowed my search to Orkney and got 3 hits - one of which was about Vikings in Orkney, not about Skara Brae, but still archeology. I had trouble loading books, but was able to look at the table of contents which seemed to lead right into the book. I'm a little confused about this. I tried to enlarge the text so I could actually read it, but the "+" sign in a circle didn't do anything.

Constitution Day was an interesting topic. A search for "Constitution Day" lead to every country but the United States. I searched "Constitution" and the drop down menu offered "Constitution and United States" but still did not seem to offer anything useful. I changed the search to "United States Constitution" and found a couple of titles that might be useful: "Constitution in Congress : the Federalist Period 1789-1801" and "Representing Popular Sovereignty : the Constitution in American Political Culture."

I knew that 'Western history" through Nebraska Press or Oklahoma Press was going to be good. My sister showed me books by Nebraska Press years ago when she was researching the westward movement. They have an amazing collection. I was very pleased to see that some of them are available as ebooks. A couple that might be useful to students were: "Mountains we have Crossed : Diaries and Letters of the Oregon Mission 1838" and "American National Historic Trials."