Database Tutorials & Learning Activities

What topics do these TexShare databases cover? How do I begin using a specific database? These questions and more are covered in these quick and easy guides.

Searching Databases

Academic Search Complete

EBSCOhost's Academic Search Complete is a powerful research tool for finding articles and other documents on almost any academic subject. This database provides indexing and abstracts for over 9,300 scholarly publications, as well as full-text articles for over half of these publications. Use Academic Search Complete when researching topics in social sciences, physical sciences, technology, and humanities.

AGRICOLA

AGRICOLA contains bibliographic records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Library. Coverage dates back to 1970 and includes more than 2.5 million citations. The citations are comprised of journal articles, monographs, theses, patents, software, audiovisual materials, and technical reports related to agriculture.

Alt Health Watch

Alt Health Watch is a database focusing on articles from the perspectives of alternative, holistic, complementary and integrated approaches to medical treatment and general health.

Bibliography of Native North Americans

The Bibliography of Native North Americans addresses all aspects of native North American culture, history, and life. This resource covers a wide range of topics including archaeology, multicultural relations, gaming, governance, legend, and literacy. It contains more than 80,000 citations for books, essays, journal articles, and government documents of the United States and Canada. Dates of coverage range from the sixteenth century to the present. BNNA will appeal to anyone interested in exploring the contributions, struggles, and issues surrounding North America's indigenous peoples.

Business Source Complete

It is the world's largest resource of full text business publications. Another EBSCO database, it offers full text journals in all disciplines of business, including marketing, management, accounting, banking, and finance, some back as far as 1886.

Consumer Health Complete

Consumer Health Complete (CHC) is an in-depth, user-friendly resource designed to answer everyday consumer health questions in both English and Spanish. CHC covers all areas of health and wellness, from mainstream medicine to perspectives on integrated and holistic medical practices.

Economía y Negocios

Economía y Negocios is the result of a collaborative effort between EBSCO Publishing and ESAN (Escuela de Administración de Negocios para Graduados). This continuously updated bibliographic database is an indispensable tool for research conducted in the areas of business and economics. It allows you to search with keywords in both Spanish and English. More than 60,000 records, dating back to the early 1980s, provide coverage for over 200 Spanish and Portuguese-language periodicals published in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Spain, the United States and elsewhere. Active titles include Revista de la CEPAL, Revista de Administraçao, Estudios Empresariales, and Agroeconómico.

ERIC

ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center, is a powerful research tool, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, that provides access to education literature and resources. ERIC indexes more than 1,000 journals included in the Current Index of Journals in Education and Resources in Education Index. This database is particularly useful for education researchers, teachers, administrators, parents, and students in teacher-preparation programs.

Fuente Academica

Fuente Academica provides PDF full text for 260 scholarly publications covering many areas of academic study. Content is provided in Spanish from respected publishers worldwide, including Revista de Arquitectura, Estudios Sobre Educacion, Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, Comunicacion y Sociedad, Revista de Ciencia Politica, Revista Historia, and more.

Health Source: Consumer Edition

An EBSCO database, Health Source: Consumer Edition covers topics such as AIDS, cancer, diabetes, drugs & alcohol, aging, fitness, nutrition & dietetics, children's health, and women's health. Its sources include books, pamphlets, reports, and dictionaries in both English and Spanish.

Health Source: Nursing & Academic

This database offers almost 550 full text journals focusing on many medical disciplines. Nearly 450 of these journals are peer-reviewed. Abstracts and indexing are offered for nearly 850 journals. Clinical Pharmacology (offering access to drug monographs for all U.S. prescription drugs and other information) is included. Full text documents are offered dating back to 1975.

Health and Wellness Resource Center

The Health and Wellness Resource Center is an in-depth, user-friendly resource that provides access to health and wellness information from authoritative medical sources. It is designed to be a one-stop resource for health research on topics such as pregnancy, nutrition, diseases, drug abuse, prescription drugs and medicine etc. and includes information from magazines, pamphlets, journals, and Web sites. There are 879 indexed sources, of which 662 are full text.

HeritageQuest

HeritageQuest presents a varied and in-depth set of data for genealogists and historians. HeritageQuest is designed to help amateur and professional geneaologists, local historians, and public library patrons to search and use data from all of the U.S. Censuses until 1930, an index of 6,500 local history and genealogy periodicals (PERSI), a database of Revolutionary War pension and bounty-land warrant, plus the full text of 25,000 local histories and family histories.

InfoTrac Custom Newspapers

InfoTrac Custom Newspapers provides access to the articles of more than 400 U.S. newspapers and 60 international English-language newspapers. It is updated daily with first-hand accounts of current and historical events on local, national, and international scales. Articles are provided in full-text and are completely indexed, including proper names.

Information Science and Technology Abstracts (ISTA)

Information Science & Technology Abstracts provides worldwide library science and information science records from more than 450 publications dating back to 1966. Information Science & Technology Abstracts combines records from Information Today, Inc. with library science records from the ERIC database and is enhanced by the inclusion of relevant abstracts from Microcomputer Abstracts, to provide coverage of abstracting and indexing, classification, online information retrieval, information management, library systems and services, electronic publishing, the information industry, searching, search engines, and more.

Legal Collection

Containing full text from nearly 250 of the world's most respected, scholarly law journals, the Legal Collection is an authoritative source for legal information. It covers topics such as criminal justice, international and federal law, organized crime, medical, labor & human resource law, ethics, the environment and much more. Many of the journals included are full text.

Literature Resources from Gale

Literature Resources from Gale (formerly called the Literature Resource Center is a compilation of three of Gale Group's core literature databases: Contemporary Authors Online, Contemporary Literary Criticism Select, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography Online. It is one of the most comprehensive literature resources available for use by high school and college students as well as more advanced library users. It contains information on over 120,000 authors and poets with more in-depth coverage of the most-studied subjects. Patrons can also access information from titles such as the Children's Literature Review, Drama Criticism, Novels for Students, Poetry Criticism, and Shakespeare for Students. Access to 4900 websites focusing on major authors and 2300 author portraits are also provided.

MasterFILE Premier

MasterFILE Premier is a multidisciplinary database that provides full text resources for more than 2,050 general reference publications covering a wide range of topics including general reference, business, education, health, general science and multi-cultural issues. Learn how to use both the basic and advanced search features, find dictionary definitions, images, maps, and flags all in this tutorial.

Medline with MeSH

This database available through EBSCO provides access to a wide range of medical information. It includes consumer health information as well as scholarly medical data. Medical topics covered include nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, mental health, and child psychology, among others, and can be a useful tool for medical students and those in the health profession as well as the general public.

Middle Search Plus

Middle Search Plus contains full text for more than 140 popular, middle school magazines. Full text is also available for thousands of biographies, historical essays and student pamphlets. Additionally, Middle Search Plus contains primary source documents, reference books, an Image Collection of 192,999 photos, and maps and flags. It also includes the Our States series, a new collection made up of 54 titles on each of the states, commonwealths and territories in the United States. Primary Search Primary Search, designed specifically for elementary school libraries, contains full text for more than 60 popular, elementary school magazines. All full text articles are assigned a reading level indicator (Lexiles). Professional Development Collection- The most comprehensive collection of full-text education journals in the world, the Professional Development Collection includes full text for nearly 550 high quality education journals as well as more than 200 educational reports.

Military & Government Collection Tutorial I

A database including nearly 400 military, government and general interest publications, with full text for nearly 300 journals, providing information on all branches of the military and US and world governmental affairs.

Military & Government Collection Tutorial II

The Military and Government Collection connects TexShare users to nearly 400 full-text periodicals, peer-reviewed journals, and government publications. The database includes news, pamphlets, press releases, and scholarly articles highlighting issues relevant to all branches of the armed forces and departments of the U.S government. This tutorial will help you get more out of this valuable resource by providing an overview of the collection as well as introducing several effective Basic and Advanced search strategies.

NetLibrary

NetLibrary allows you to access a wide range of research, reference and reading materials from any location. Resources include eBooks, eJournals and reference materials.

Newspaper Source

Newspaper Source provides cover-to-cover full text for 20 large American & international newspapers, including The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Times (London), Toronto Star. The database also contains selected full text for more than 230 regional newspapers, including The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, Daily News (New York), and the San Jose Mercury News. In addition, full text television & radio news transcripts are provided from CBS News, FOX News, and NPR.

Primary Search

Primary Search provides users with full text access to nearly 70 primary school magazines and indexing and abstracts for 100 additional titles. Full text coverage goes back to 1990 while the indexing and abstracts goes back to 1985.

Regional Business News Tutorial I

Regional Business News covers about 75 publications that include business news from rural and metropolitan areas of the U.S., and it allows searching of various news sources at once.

Regional Business News Tutorial II

Religion and Philosophy Collection

The comprehensive Religion and Philosophy Collection covers world religions, major denominations, biblical studies, religious history, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of language, moral philosophy and the history of philosophy. It offers more than 300 full text journals and is a superlative tool for researchers and students of theology and philosophy.

Texas Digital Sanborn Maps

Texas Digital Sanborn Maps is a collection of digitized maps that provides detailed property and land-use records of more than 12,000 U.S. towns and cities covering 100 years of the past. Enhance your knowledge of this valuable historical resource.

Texas Reference Center

Texas Reference Center is designed specifically for Texas school and public libraries. Soon Expanding to 100 full text periodicals, 100 full-text reference books, several Texas newspapers, it offers such titles as: Best in Texas, Texas Business Review, Texas Education Review, Texas Journal of Agriculture & Natural Resources, Texas Journal of Women & the Law, Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights, Texas Law Review, Texas Magazine, Texas Monthly, Texas Public Health Association Journal, Texas Review, Touchstone (Texas State Historical Association), and many more.

Twentieth Century Poetry: English

A merger of both their English and American poetry collections, ProQuest's Twentieth Century Poetry offers various paths to search through over 70,000 poems from almost 300 poets, from 1900 to the present day. The database offers keyword, title, first line, and poet name searches but also provides a "select from list" feature that helps the user home in on search terms. TCP provides information about publishers as well as poets and the texts of their work, and includes extensive bibliographic detail and citations.

Twentieth Century Poetry: American

Expand your knowledge with this learning activity designed for the American collection of Twentieth Century Poetry.

WorldCat (OCLC)

WorldCat is an index produced by OCLC that includes records of items in almost any format from thousands of libraries around the world. Items included date back as far as 1000BC. It is a large database containing millions of records, which exist in approximately 400 languages. The search pages are user friendly as they will keep track of previous searches, allow the user to email records, and link the user to libraries in their area.

World History Collection

World History Collection offers a global look at history with content from 6 continents. It contains full text for 150 titles, including many peer-reviewed journals, some dating as far back as 1964. These hand-selected information sources cover a wide range of historical topics including anthropology, art, culture, economics, government, heritage, military, politics, regional issues, and more. In addition to the many full text articles, indexing and abstracts are provided for all journals in the collection. Many of these are in PDF format and can be searched electronically.

Library of Texas

Search multiple databases and Texas library catalogs simultaneously.

The Library of Texas searches for books, articles, CDs, videos and other information resources from over 65 public libraries, 25 research libraries and 16 subscription-only databases. Library of Texas finds items that have your search terms(s) in their author, title, subject, abstract or ID-number fields. Choose to search only library catalogs, only databases, or a combination of both.

View the video tutorial of Library of Texas in Flash

Library of Texas - Overview

A general overview of the Library of Texas.

Library of Texas - Basic Searching

Basic searching using the Library of Texas search interface is covered.

Library of Texas - Advanced Searching

Advanced search options using the Library of Texas search interface are covered.

Frequently Asked Questions: Using TexShare Databases

The TexShare Databases are supported in part by funds granted to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent Federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners by helping libraries and museums serve their communities.