(#47) / InfoTrac Junior Edition/ (produced) by Gale Cengage Learning / (Database)

Opening

Bibliographic Information:

InfoTrac Junior Edition / 
(produced) by Gale Cengage Learning

(Access through Humboldt County Library)

Cost Unknown – Contact the company directly

2011

Body of Content

Summary: The Gale InfoTrac Junior Edition represents an academic database – set for the purposes of aiding school curriculum and helping students find resources for their projects and papers.  The results appear in ranked fashion – similar to Internet search engines.  A handful of format types are searchable (magazine, newspaper, etc.).  Although the database is primarily intended for an English audience, language translation includes the addition of three new languages – possible translations for Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.  Some special features include text-to-speech technology to aid students with special learning situations.  The site includes around 300 indexed sources – with 230 of those available as full-text, retrievable documents.  Additional help tools allow students to view documents as PDFs, change citations to different cite styles, transcribe the article into a MP3 for later listening as an audio file, translate the article into a variety of languages (11 are possible), besides the basic capacities of printing, downloading, and emailing articles and search results (Gale, 2011).    

Critique: This database contains a very simply interface.  The search fields and matrixes are very bare-boned.  While this creates a straightforward search procedure, the student does not have much in the way of advance search techniques.  And as such, a librarian could do little to demonstrate more effective searching techniques – such as Boolean search strings.  The advanced search option does allow for searching within different format types – within encyclopedias and/or magazines and/or maps and/or newspapers and/or references or all source types.  The search boxes do allow for “and” functionality – but the database is devoid of keyword strings attached by “or” and “not”.   

While this database contains a decent amount of information, such a simplistic operational framework leads itself more to audience in lower high school grades or upper middle school grades.  Libraries looking for more academic venues – i.e. looking to prepare junior and senior year students for university studies – should look elsewhere.  

Teaser: A straightforward interface allows students easy access to a host of resources for their research purposes.

Information about the Author: Gale is an educational company – specializing in academic publishing and educational database programs.  The Michigan-based company was founded in 1954 with a few business mergers and/or purchases along with way.   Other popular database collections – besides the InfoTrac label – include Gale Virtual Reference Library, Health & Wellness Resource Center, Military & Intelligence Database, Book Review Index, and Biography & Genealogy Master Index.  Gale is broad business – with an online presence which includes Encyclopedia.com and New Catholic Encyclopedia (Wikipedia, 2011).   

Supplemental Material

Genre: Reference

Curriculum Ties: Library – information retrieval, electronic databases

Booktalking Ideas: 1) “Looking for help in an attempt to write a killer term paper?”

Reading Level: The database is included for students – for either middle school or high school ages – with best usage by students (12-15).

Challenge Issues and Defense: Given the educational format and the types of articles as academic in nature, a lack of challenges is expected.  The information is more limited and narrow than an Internet search (in general) – leading to fewer challenges of particular objections to content.  

Personal Reasons for Inclusion: I wanted to include a few databases – unfortunately, the local library did not have much of a selection. 

Last Thoughts

References:

Gale. (2011). InfoTrac Junior Edition [PDF]. Retrieved from http://www.gale.cengage.com/

pdf/facts/itjr.pdf

Wikipedia. (2011). Gale (Cengage) [Webpage]. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/

wiki/Gale_%28Cengage%29

Listening to (Music):

Artist – Third Eye Blind / Album – “Third Eye Blind”