Monday, November 25, 2013

Thanksgiving, Parades and Library Databases???

Elliot Erwitt 1988
What does Thanksgiving have to do with library databases? I wanted to find out more about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and wondered if an academic library would have any information about this type of cultural phenomenon...

I first began looking for images of the parade balloons in the ARTstor database and located several beautiful photographs like the one shown above. A Google image search produced hundreds of additional parade images!


My research continued with JSTOR --- it's one of my favorite library databases because it is easy to use and has a wide variety of journal topics and titles. I tried a simple search on "Macy's" AND "Thanksgiving day parade" which resulted in 69 article results:

JSTOR search results

I tried the same search terms in the ProQuest database, which produced over 5,000 possible full text articles!

ProQuest search results

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the library databases could provide so much information on a single topic!  I'd better get busy ---  got lot's of reading to do!

Happy Thanksgiving !!!

No comments :