 I'm here on the Eric homepage and I'm going to start a search. This video is a little long, hang in there. I'm going to show you some features that you might not be aware of in the Eric database. I'm going to start by looking at corona virus. I'm curious if there's been any scholarship that has actually gotten through the pipeline and been published. I'm interested in disability. I'm interested in students that might be getting this compounded effect of the corona pandemic. I'm going to do a search and see what the results are. It turns out that there is already some publication and scholarship. Just a reminder for those of you that have been using the Eric database, there are Eric documents and Eric journals in Eric. Everything that is an academic journal is in one pile, and everything that is not a journal is in another called an Eric document, including reports and books and curriculum and all kinds of things. The default is to put them all together. If you're actually interested in only journal articles, you have to then select that and then it'll resort. What I want to focus on and tell you about is some of the vocabulary features of Eric that you might not be familiar with. This term disability, I'm not really pleased with that. I don't think that's the best term that I want to use. But how do I know what is some other options in the database that I can use? Taking advantage of the Eric thesaurus is really smart. You can browse the thesaurus. I tend to use term contains rather than begins with. This tends to have better results. I can go in and I can search and I can see, here you go, intellectual disability severe, disability discrimination, some writing. That's already helping me flesh out and broaden what I'm trying to think about in terms of getting at some different ideas, theories, perspectives. Here is the definition for intellectual disability. Two or more standard deviations below the mean, 70 IQ, okay, this is a very classic definition. I'm recognizing that. I'm not sure. That's still what I'm trying to get at. I noticed that prior to 2015, mental retardation was used, unfortunately. But that does affect how I search retroactively for research in this particular area, how students were getting outreach services if there was some kind of a stay at home mandate. Okay, I think I'm going to try and just do my own brainstorming. And I'm going to type in special needs. So I think I'm going to explore something a little bit different on my own. Special needs, testing accommodations, mainstream, here's IEP. This might be getting a little more closely to the idea that I'm looking for broad legislation category, special assistance to achieve educational equity. All right, that's actually more what I'm interested in. And I can see through these subject terms that educational needs, disadvantaged at risk, there's lots of things that I am low income. So I'm getting at this idea of special needs. Disability is so layered and complex and it's never usually just one thing. And so special needs is actually going to be a better search for me. So if I go back to my search and I type in COVID again and then I do special needs, I think that's going to get me a better search results. It's going to be more inclusive of the kinds of topics that I am looking for. I'm going to limit here to academic journals and there are eight. Remember, this is a new topic. We might be used to the hundreds and thousands of search results. But this is new. And again, for the purpose of this video, there's lots of going, there's going to be some really interesting things. But I'm just going to click on this first hit of this article of free and appropriate education, the time of COVID. And I can look at this, it's published, it's not available from Eric. It's very recent, okay? It has some really interesting descriptors. Descriptors and thesaurus are related in that, again, Eric functions to really provide this really rich and breadth and depth of vocabulary. Something pops out to me interdisciplinary approach. There's no interdisciplinary approach in the title. It's not in the abstract. But this article talks about interdisciplinary approach. It must, enough for that descriptor to be assigned to this article. So that means that perhaps I want to add interdisciplinary approach, if that's, again, what I'm interested in exploring in terms of pandemic approaches to curriculum. All right. This is not available from Eric. Most things are. But when things aren't, you can use this little find it button. And this find it button is really slick. It'll take you through in back into the Western libraries in order to get interlibrary loan. It says, not available, but we can get it for you, okay? So I click on interlibrary loan and look all the fields have been filled out for me. There's, all I have to do is click submit request. And I will get this article. And generally, these materials come within 20, 48 hours. I highly encourage you to become familiar with article interlibrary loan in order to take advantage of those services, okay? So a couple other things that I want to show you, the limiter fields, taking advantage of those as well. If you know a particular researcher, a particular author, I'm going to look at not COVID, but let's look at literacy and let's look at literacy for special needs, okay? And I know that there is a journal called the reading teacher. And that journal is an excellent journal that publishes articles on literacy efforts and curriculum and literature, etc. So I've selected that, I'm going to do my search. And my search results now will all be from the reading teacher. And here's the PDF right here, all right? You might have a journal that is recommended to you by your professor. This is or a particular researcher. And so taking advantage of these limiter fields right here to search within a particular journal, you can add lines to your search as well. If you wanted to search more than one, our journal as well, okay? So just to recap, taking advantage of the thesaurus, taking advantage of these selector fields, using find it for interlibrary loan, using taking advantage of these side fields, and getting yourself familiar with Eric and moving through the database in a way that will help you to refine and be efficient in your searching so that you can get to the most interesting part, which is reading the articles and thinking about them and synthesizing the ideas that you'd like to say for your work.