Well, this turned out to be an interesting week for me on the Marvel Challenge. As a Children's Librarian in a public library, especially a librarian with a background that includes art school, I love getting crafty in and about the library. Many odd things that I've made adorn my desk and entice young patrons to come up to see, touch, and discuss them. Right away I knew exploring the crafts and hobbies of Marvel could be useful and dangerously distracting.
I spent some time looking through the interface and saw a lot of potential for discovery via browsing techniques and was quite pleased by how broad some of the categories seemed to be reaching. When it came time to search, I decided to limit myself to a project I've had stewing in my mind for a while: Display items of a space/Star Wars theme. Star Wars is one of those never-go-out-of-style topics with my young readers, and I've been thinking for some time of modifying a globe into a death star, or building a few ships to hang above the play area.
I was quite surprised by the near total lack of 'star wars' results when I clicked over to the Projects tab, hoping to find something that might work well with my plans and encountered immediate disappointment. Of the 28 results for Star Wars projects, only one of the results had anything to do with the Lucas classics, and that entry was listed dead last of the 28.
Exploring the help feature I found it to be well laid-out, but as my very first library job was primarily teaching these very databases, I didn't discover how to -do- much that wasnew. What I did discover was that the Hobbies and Crafts databases lets one use an impressive array of search modifiers. Booleans and Expanders are all common enough, but wildcard and especially proximity searches are often overlooked. The visual search was unlike anything I had seen before, but sadly it only seems to exist within the help files, and not as anything actually usable by the public. Oh well.
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