Daily Life: A Sure Hit For Middle School

Suite will greatly expand most library collections

By Shonda Brisco -- School Library Journal, 10/1/2006

One size does not fit all. For anyone who has ever tried to make something fit (especially when it won’t), it’s best to realize that the word “all” does not really mean “everyone.” The same thing is true for subscription databases. While it might seem that all students in grades K–12 can benefit from the use of the database contents, in reality, the best fit may actually be for a smaller segment of the entire population.

Words of advice: Try before you buy!

Grades K–12

Cost $450 for annual subscriptions for school libraries with enrollments of one to 500; $650 for enrollments of 501 to 1000; $875 for enrollments of 1001 to 2000. Additional price reductions between 20–35 percent are also available when two or more Greenwood databases are purchased. Pricing for individual, public, college, and university libraries are also available.

The Big Picture Greenwood’s Daily Life Online suite of social history databases provides librarians with a combination of three reference-filled resources for students in a one-stop search environment. Daily Life Online, World Cultures Today, and the soon-to-be released World Folklore and Folklife can be purchased as stand-alone databases or as a suite of resources that provide federated searching across the content for a wealth of materials on history, people, economics, religion, cultures, and more.

While the databases are updated yearly from Greenwood’s print research materials in subjects such as history, geography, and cultural research, accessibility by multiple users—who may not have access to each of the printed volumes—will certainly be one of the suites’ greatest features, especially during a class research assignment. Teachers and librarians with limited materials in areas of history, social studies, geography, sociology, or world religions will find these databases to be a useful addition to the reference collection.

Look & Feel Each of the databases in the suite prominently displays a topographical image of the world with photographs of either prominent cities or various faces from different cultures. Searching either database is like opening a major atlas or encyclopedia filled with more than just maps and facts. In fact, each database is filled with volumes of research that entice the user to continue investigating various topics.

Searches in World Cultures Today can be conducted in a Quick Search format, by Geographic Region or Country, or by specific subjects. These specific subject areas include History, Geographic, Social Customs, Family Life, Leisure, Food, Religion, Holidays and Festivals, Clothing, and the Arts.

Searches in Daily Life also provide a Quick Search format, as well as a Past (50,000 BCE–1900 C.E.) or Present (1901–present) search format. In addition, a Regional or Country search can be performed, as well as a Subject search, which can include Domestic Life, Economic Life, Intellectual Life, Material Life, Political Life, Recreational Life, or Religious Life.

Both databases provide an Advance Search component which includes Keyword and Boolean search options, as well as limiters that allow the user to include specific Subject searching such as Domestic Life and Social Customs or Regional searching by continent and Time periods. Results can also be sorted by the number of hits retrieved, Time Periods, Country, Region, or Subject.

In addition, both databases provide a Teacher Resources link on the front page that offers lesson plans by strand, as well as the specific state correlations. Resource materials within this area provide both the novice and the experienced teacher or librarian with information on how to best utilize the databases for information literacy. Examples of lesson plans, graphic organizers, and rubrics are provided to help instructors develop lesson plans while teaching students how to effectively search online databases. Note: Greenwood is giving this product a new home page with new features early this fall. The site will be re-indexed as well.

How It Works A quick search in the suite of databases on timely or historical topics provides users with various easily accessible option tabs from the results screen. For example, a Quick Search on the subject of Iraq provided 111 Articles (taken from various sources that are both listed and cited below the article entry), 61 Book Chapters (taken from Greenwood’s Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World), one Primary Source (dated 1945), five Images, and 16 Resources taken from the CIA Factbook (an online source freely available at www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook).

The copyright dates for some of the articles within the database range from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s. For example, one article entitled “Teen Life in the Middle East” cited information from The Modern History of Iraq dated 1985. In another example, “Iraq: Social Customs and Life Styles” used one source from 1970: “Sheik and Effendi: Changing Patterns of Authority Among the El-Shabana, a Tribe of Southern Iraq.” Additional searches for terms such as “Hezbollah” resulted in only five articles, which were taken from sources from the late 1990s. But overall, the majority of the materials (aside from the primary documents) are within a ten year copyright span.

Each search page provides a Related Resources box with a short listing of additional materials including Chronologies, Images, Maps, External Links, and the CIA Factbook. On the left side of the results page, students will find a listing of search topics directly related to the topic including the Time, Subject, Region and Country, all of which can help users locate additional information.

With reference materials that total over thirty titles (many of which are multivolume), the database does not lack in breadth of coverage of basic historical, chronological, or topical areas for European, North American, or Middle Eastern countries. It does, however, lack in coverage for African and Latin American countries. With updates and online information being added annually in an attempt to make history come to life for today’s students, this suite of databases should be evaluated yearly to determine if it meets the needs of classroom research.

For Students & Teachers In general, most students between grades five and eight would find the database effective and user-friendly for general research on topics relating to various cultures, countries, or historical events. However, while the database does provide a great deal of information for the general reader, upper-level history instructors may find it less effective for academic research in high school after an initial exposure to the contents. A positive addition to each entry, however, is the resource information, as well as the “Works Cited” listings, which provide users with a bibliography of additional works to investigate if the entries provided seem too brief.

Report Card For middle or junior high schools, this suite of databases receives an A. As a complete package, Daily Life Online could provide up to a third of the reference materials found in many middle school libraries, covering areas of history, geography, sociology, religion, arts, entertainment, and economic issues from around the world. For middle schoolers, the range of information within the suite of databases works extraordinarily well together, although each database could be easily used independently to meet specific research needs or curriculums. The combination of databases not only increases the breadth of resources available but also increases the opportunity for students to understand both the historical and cultural aspects of the topic.

However, for high schools, this suite receives a B-. The databases still present a “menu-driven” look that could be considered too juvenile for the high school research level. Convincing many high school history teachers (who have little difficulty diving into 500-page historical tomes for recreational reading) that Daily Life Online can meet their students’ online research needs will be a challenge.

Even though the databases may not significantly cover all areas of history, culture, or geography for the high school level, the contents are being updated and new modules are being added yearly to make an already well-known print reference equally well known in the world of databases. As the content grows, it is likely that the databases will gain more respect among high school teachers and librarians. In the meantime, it is easy to state that this suite of databases fits middle school students the best.