I like to assist my colleagues who teach basic information literacy skills to freshmen in humanities classes. I generally do it a few times a semester. The students are given an assignment where we suggest they use Academic Search Premier. Some of the topics in the class I gave yesterday were:
1) Violence in Media: Cause of Violence in Today’s Youth vs. A Non-Factor in Today’s Youth
2) Government Control of Healthcare: For vs. Against
3) Government Bailout Programs: Necessary Evil vs. Unnecessary Waste of Taxpayers’ Money
4) Laws Preventing Parental Corporal Punishment (Public discipline): Protecting Innocent Children vs. Government Overstepping their Boundaries
It was very unlucky that I could not access Academic Search Premier or any other of the Ebscohost family of databases. I received a frantic text message from the Information Literacy Librarian stating that their system was down. Fortunately I had a powerpoint available where I could show students how to access the database. I then told them they could use Lexis-Nexis to start on the assignment even though it included newspaper articles that were not peer reviewed.
I started the class at 1 PM. A colleague informed me that as late as 10:30 PM Ebscohost was still down. I can not remember a database being offline for such a long period of time. At 7 AM today the system was up.
Remember Murphy's Law. "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong".
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