The search engine in the Gale MLA is very particular about how you enter information. Try searching "Long day's journey into night" as a title. If you enter it with no punctuation, as is acceptible in most search engines like EBSCO's or CUNY+, you get no results. You must include the apostrophe in "day's" to get results. I think that this level of precision is one that our students will have difficultly with.
I don't mind the lack of punctuation as much as the loss of the ability to do specialized types of searching. For instance, putting a dash between words in a title would pull up the work in the descriptor field. Hence you could search On-the-Road or Long-Day's-Jouney-into-night and pull up all articles on this work in the basic search mode. This type of search was also a little bit quicker.
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Comments (2)
Danise Hoover said
at 12:15 pm on Jun 10, 2008
The search engine in the Gale MLA is very particular about how you enter information. Try searching "Long day's journey into night" as a title. If you enter it with no punctuation, as is acceptible in most search engines like EBSCO's or CUNY+, you get no results. You must include the apostrophe in "day's" to get results. I think that this level of precision is one that our students will have difficultly with.
Danise Hoover
William Gargan said
at 4:13 pm on Jun 10, 2008
I don't mind the lack of punctuation as much as the loss of the ability to do specialized types of searching. For instance, putting a dash between words in a title would pull up the work in the descriptor field. Hence you could search On-the-Road or Long-Day's-Jouney-into-night and pull up all articles on this work in the basic search mode. This type of search was also a little bit quicker.
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