Battle of the Databases

Today is a "test" of the gods. Not really, because obviously I affirm the Trinity, but today is meant to be a "helpful" overview for the patrons of MBI Crowell Library and in particularly the students! I have been given 5 main databases available through MBI Crowell Library (and believe me there are soooo many more!) and I must choose the best of the best! The five databases may or may not be familiar to you--Britannica, Credo, eLibrary, Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, & World Almanac. In order to create a "standardize test" I chose to search one topic and compare+contrast which of the five is best in regards to my specific search and "overall."

The topic of today’s search is “Sustainable Farming.” Yes the school year has begun hence I will now take my volunteer time to benefit my personal education! I think it might be said that I am fulfilling the old adage; killing two birds with one stone—but if anyone knows me well, I am a pacifist, so I prefer to say something less violent…but I still have yet to make up a phrase...who has time for that...not I.

Today’s “search” is based off an excitable presentation for Wellness Seminar—a required class here at MBI. My group will be presenting on the health benefits of buying organic/sustainable farmed goods. And my emphasis will be on the biblical aspect of how sustainable/organic farming helps us faithfully honor creation as image bearers. So I began the search—and right from the get go “Funk & Wagnalls” has repeatedly been under an “occurring problem” for the “search time” aka Funk & Wagnalls bit the dust. Left to run the race, I quickly exnayed World Almanac with zero search results. Britannica is a modern day “underdog” of databases with Wikipedia dominating the internet world, yet for today’s purposes “sustainable farming” did not have the best results. Left for competition are Credo and eLibrary. Credo is a good source for information—but the return results were lacking in “match” to my topic and were a bit left field for what I was looking for—although I am quite interested in the philosophical idea of sustainable living.

So today’s winner is eLibrary. eLibrary had the most unique sources for sustainable farming. They even had an article published from Farmers Weekly this past April. It seems like this database is updated pretty regularly and with the “citation view” button eLibrary makes it easy to see how “reliable” the article is for your purposes. They have purple boxes labeled “scholarly journals” for scholarly articles. eLibrary has a box on the left with multiple avenues of information labeled for your search result: newspapers, pictures, magazines, maps, books, audio/video, websites, and transcripts. Look forward to a poster made by yours truly promoting all the benefits of eLibrary as an online database made possible by MBI Crowell. I mean eLibrary even has a place to make your own online quizzes that can be saved onto your account!

And on a completely different note (I'm bad at transitions) we got new chairs! MORE new chairs! They are located next to our other previous new golden guys under the sky light!  And yes--they are student approved as shown by Rachel Strull studying for Old Testament Biblical Theology! And believe me she was sleepy and these chairs helped her do work and stay awake!