Expos 20: Laughing Matters

HOLLIS 

• Why: Think of it as the library's major research discovery platform. HOLLIS combines the contents of a traditional library catalog (citations and sometimes full text or images of books, manuscript collections, photographs, government documents, journal titles but not their full text, and so on) with another huge database of full-text articles from scholarly journals, magazines, and newsmedia.  

GOOGLE SCHOLAR

• Why: Google Scholar searches differently from most library databases. It scrapes everything on the web that it thinks is a scholarly citation and indexes it for your use. It is a typically a broader way to search for scholarly articles than HOLLIS, though not necessarily historically as deep. In addition to searching "metadata" (lots of descriptive info about a book or article, it also searches full-text . This can be an additional advantage when you are seeking a "nugget" that traditional database searching can't surface easily. It is important to follow these instructions to get the most full text from Google Scholar by linking it to HOLLIS.

ACADEMIC SEARCH PREMIER (EBSCOHOST) Harvard Key

• Why: The advantages of Academic Search Premier are 1) its multidisciplinary focus; 2) its inclusion of very recent content; 3) its mix of scholarly, news, and magazine content.