eLibrary Update
Nov./Dec. 2010
No-search research, fresh videos, lessons...
eLibrary gets research right with contextualized results called ProQuest Essentials, featuring best-of content organized around more than 3,500 most-studied topics in schools just like yours.
With the holidays just ahead, now is the perfect time to review our latest title lists and video picks, tap into our no-search Essentials to power easy student research, and adapt our model BookCart curriculum modules to your needs.
Your students learn in different ways, and eLibrary helps them all make the grade!
As always, don't miss our full set of related resources at proquestk12.com, our usage-boosting in-school kit, free Web training, more activity-rich newsletters, training videos, and more.
Timely Video & Animation Picks @ eLibrary
Click each animation or video to start playback inside your subscription.
And don't forget to click the Audio/Video content icon on the main search screen to mine our exclusive content, each and every month.
Top 3 Websites @ ProQuestK12.com
Each month, our SIRS team scours the Internet for top-quality websites for classrooms and libraries. Dive into this month's selections: Holidays, Pearl Harbor, Rosa's Bus.
Fall Feedback: Students & Staff
"I wish I knew about the online resources like ProQuest, SIRS, and eLibrary where you can search a topic and get an enormous amount of articles on whatever you are researching. I just found out that [Joel] Barlow had these on their website last week!"—M. Brennan, Student @ Redding, CT
"We Love eLibrary: ... Used for general research and our annual spring survey always shows it is #1 favorite by faculty and students for general research. Can't say enough about SIRS: Love the Top 10 Box, A-Z list and Yes-No Topic Information boxes, they are awesome! Thank you for sharing why CultureGrams is so special! My student library worker just walked in and said "Hey, we used CultureGrams last hour..." Thanks for caring about our school kids and making your products so teen-user friendly!"
—S. Hacker, LMS @ Bolivar, MO
Essential Content in eLibrary
If you're ready to get students and staff beyond "Googling," then you're ready for ProQuest! Unlike other aggregated databases and search engines, at ProQuest you'll find ours are designed specifically to put research into context for users. Discover the difference this makes!
eLibrary gets research right with contextualized results called ProQuest Essentials. Fully integrated within search results, they help students easily navigate the information available.
☆ SIIA CODiE 2010 Finalist, Best Education Reference or Search Service
More than 3,300 ProQuest Essentials Our editors develop pages around most-studied and queried topics. They cover the gamut, including typical assignments, issues in the news, and topics of personal interest. And, the collection is always growing! Every week dozens are added as new topics rise in interest.
Better search results Gathering together best-of content selected to provide a starting point for research, each page offers a blend of background information, current analysis, and informative data, as well as links to related topics. And, because it's all fully integrated into search results, it puts everything into context from a single location.
More multimedia results ProQuest Essentials are more than just an encyclopedia entry. They bring together a consistent mix of full-text articles, stunning images, interactive graphics, streaming videos, educational websites, and more—all drawn from the more than 80 million documents in eLibrary.
View an updated listing of ProQuest Essentials broken down by subject area in PDF or Excel (XLS) format.
Finding each Essential is easy. Want to see the Harry Potter page? Just type "Harry Potter" into the search box, and click Search. The collected content will appear at the top of your search results.
New Content Listings & More
Our editors have been busy this Fall. The evidence? Many new and revised content listings were recently posted online to help you find and make use of the millions of documents, photos, free lesson plans (BookCarts), and other resources inside your subscription.
Click each link to download the current versions of search document to your computer:
- eLibrary Title List (PDF | XLS)
- ProQuest Essentials Collection (PDF | XLS)
- BookCart Lesson Plan Models (Listings & Copy Instructions)
- BookCart Curriculum Maker Training Links (One Page, Every Link)
- eBooks by Subject Area (PDF)
Lesson Plan: Graphene and the Nobel Prize in Physics
Every once in a while, a new technology discovery brings with it the potential to revolutionize the way we live and do business. Graphene matches that blueprint, because its application can improve or overhaul the existing paradigm in so many scenarios.
It's a one-cell carbon film that is the basis for materials stronger than steel, is capable of being transparent and can replace expensive materials like platinum and iridium.
Students: Imagine some of that material used for a stronger screen applied to a Kindle, iPad, smart phone, or used to transfer and store energy more efficiently in solar panels.
The story behind graphene starts with two scientists at the University of Manchester, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work: Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. They began by peeling away layers of crystal with scotch tape and refined the process to create incredibly thin strips of carbon. The process gets more complex from there, but its impact in the energy and device efficiencies space is far reaching.
So far, fossil fuel still owns a strong lead over other sources of energy because it's cheaper to exploit. Despite the difficulty we now have with drilling for new oil and transporting it to locations where it's needed most, it still provides the biggest bang for the dollar, sometimes literally. Graphene could change that to some degree because it creates less resistance to electrical circuits and potentially can store energy more efficiently.
ProQuest has created a free BookCart lesson plan to help your students learn more about this revolutionary discovery in science—"Graphene--Nanotechnology and the Future." Learn how to access, copy, and use this activity here.
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