Database Competency

This assignment requires testing four different search strategies using four different databases. My search question was "What are the effects of the digital divide on elementary children?"

Search #1 LibLit and the Building Block strategy

I wanted to divide my search into three concepts: effect, digital divide and children
S1: Digitial divide or knowledge divide
S2: effect or influence or impact
S3: children or kids or students

First I performed a basic search using only the term 'digital divide' and received 290 hits. I then used the advanced search option and used the terms 'digital divide AND effect AND children' which produced a single hit:

Noce, Anthony A.. "A new benchmark for Internet use: A logistic modeling of factors influencing Internet use in CanadaGovernment Information Quarterly 25. 3 (2008), 462-76. Accessed July 21, 2010 from LibraryLit database.


This did not give me much hope for further searching. I decided to use all the concepts together in an advanced search to see if I could find any more relevant documents. I searched (digital divide OR knowledge divide) AND (effect OR influence OR impact) AND (children OR kids OR students) and was able to find 3 relevant hits including:

Rosenfeld, E. Blocking Web 2.0 Tools in Schools: Creating a New Digital Divide. Teacher Librarian v. 35 no. 3 (February 2008) p. 6. Accessed July 21, 2010 from the LibraryLit database.

Search #2 JSTOR and the Specific Facet First

I am using the same three concepts as search 1: effect, digital divide and children

S1: effect (1717457 hits)
S2: digital divide (5528 hits)
S3: children (34096 hits)

According so my initial results I should start with the term 'digital divide' because it produced the fewest hits. After reviewing the hits most do not seem relevant. One of the articles that was relevant to my search query was:

Mauro F. Guillén and Sandra L. Suárez.Explaining the Global Digital Divide: Economic, Politcal and Sociological Drivers of Cross-National Internet Use. Social Forces, Vol. 84, No. 2 (Dec., 2005), pp. 681-708. Accessed July 21, 2010 through the JSTOR database.

Because of the large amount of hits received, I've decided that this strategy will not be effective. I should move on to Successive Fractions to narrow my results.


Search #3 WorldCat and the Successive Fractions strategy

Again I will use the concepts effect, digital divide and children

S1: effect OR impact OR influence (1881360)
S2: digital divide OR knowledge divide (4503)
S3: children OR kids OR students (3498934)

'children OR kids OR students' is the broadest facet so I will start with the 3, 398, 934 hits and add 'effect OR impact OR influence' to my search terms. This resulted in 90, 887 hits, still too many to search effectively. I then added my last set of terms 'digital divide OR knowledge divide' to the search. A much more manageable 106 records were found. The most relevant document I found was:

Krueger, Alan B. 2000. The digital divide in educating African-American students and workers. Princeton, N.J.: Industrial Relations Section, Princeton University. Accessed July 21, 2010 through the WorldCat database.


Search #4 Project Muse and the Citation Pearl Growing strategy AKA Snowballing

I decided to start with "digital divide among children" which gave me 366 hits. I noticed that my search was looking for the terms "among" which didn't help my results so I revised my search to "digital divide AND school AND children". This narrowed my search to 284, still not a manageable number of records to browse. Some of the subject headings were 'elementary education' and 'social aspects' so I furthered revised my search to "digital divide AND elementary education AND students". I was presented with 40 hits but most of them focused on elementary education and students, not the digital divide. I decided I would browse the records and look for relevant articles. I found this one:

Attewell, Paul, Belkis Suazo-Garcia and Juan Battle . "Computers and Young Children: Social Benefit or Social Problem?Social Forces 82. 1 (2003), 277-296. Accessed July 21, 2010 through Project Muse database.

Conclusions

While searching I noticed that some of the databases are more suitable for specific types of searching. WorldCat and LibLit were very user-friendly and were great for building block searches. Although I didn't post about the particular database, I found Lexis very hard to navigate and my hits were limited to 1000 each time so I wasn't getting an accurate result. After completing this competency I can see the relevancy of the snow-balling strategy better than I did previously. It is something I do naturally but had never known the name. I found the specific facet first to be the least helpful.