Knowledge Handler

Information Sources & Information Sifting Techniques

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Location: Independence, Ohio, United States

I am a retired librarian, most recently serving at Indiana Wesleyan University's Cleveland Education Center.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

THEFREELIBRARY.COM

WWW.THEFREELIBRARY.COM is a full-text database which offers access to 3 million articles from Gale Research.   It does not provide full citations to the paper source material (just article title, author, journal title, date of publication) and appears to be funded by advertising.   I am not impressed with the abscence of helps and weak indexing of THEFREELIBRARY. If one does a keyword search for phrase like "Indiana Wesleyan" (using quote marks), the results are those of an "OR" search showing every document that has either the word "Indiana" or the word "Wesleyan".  
Every search engine and database I have used recognizes that terms placed in quotes should be treated as a phrase, so the lack of this functionality is an unexpected frustration.


-D.D.

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