The Journey
A newsletter for chapter advisors, chapter officers, and
regional officers.
October 2000
Issue
XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine
FREE Trial Available to Students and Faculty Members
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XanEdu™, a division of Bell & Howell’s Information and Learning, has recently formed an innovative new partnership with Phi Theta Kappa. As a result, students and faculty members will now have the opportunity to take advantage of free trial subscriptions to the XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine, an on-line collection of information comprised of hundreds of course-aligned, pre-selected periodicals, magazines, journals and newspapers — the resources students and faculty use with assignments or for research and curriculum projects.
The XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine (formerly ProQuest Academic Edition™) is a one-stop on-line destination for students and faculty, offering anywhere, anytime, on-line access to a multidimensional knowledge base. Resources in this database have been organized for rapid, topic-specific search results, with direct relevance to the courses users are teaching or taking.
Productive Searches ... Respected Academic Resources.
The XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine is a web-based archive, organized by discipline and course. Materials accessed via the ReSearch Engine include unique, full-text content, often unavailable from other on-line sources. Articles frequently include images, graphics, charts and photos, giving college- and university-based users a more comprehensive resource. The ReSearch Engine also offers reference and “Best of the Web” sources as well.
Unique aspects of the ReSearch Engine are its 12,000 topic trees. These are pre-selected searches aligned with course content. According to Ingrid Ellerbe, XanEdu’s Vice President of Marketing, the company is adding the number of available topic trees continually. She notes, “We’ve made the topic trees easy to identify and productive to search. This eliminates wasted time “surfing.” Topic trees are particularly valuable because they have been developed by subject area experts, who have designed the search for rapid, accurate data retrieval.” Users can search both the current database (1998-present) and the archived database (1986-1997). Keyword searches are also supported, giving users optimum research flexibility and efficiency.
Undergraduate students and faculty have noted that searches using the XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine provide richer, deeper authentic information in a much more efficient, focused way than major consumer-oriented Internet search engines. Students also have the advantage of learning to use primary sources effectively and critically, an important concern when incorporating Internet-based materials into research.
Broad Subject Coverage
The XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine, which is updated daily, covers the areas of arts and humanities, business and economics, science, psychology, applied science and technology, social sciences, education, telecommunications and computing, and nursing. The database also offers leisure interest reading, which includes articles about current events, culture, and other subjects of general and personal interest.
Through the XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine, subscribers will also have access to general reference resources from Encyclopedia Britannica, the world’s most authoritative and largest reference product in the English language. XanEdu™ also offers Britannica’s “Best of the Web” resource, encompassing more than 125,000 web sites and the text of more than 100 million web pages.
Ellerbe added, “We believe that the XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine will rapidly become an essential, indispensable student and faculty resource. Just as students make sure to pack their dictionaries, atlases and thesauruses for each new school year, they’ll also make certain to have their on-line subscriptions to the XanEdu™ ReSearch Engine.”
To inaugurate the partnership between Phi Theta Kappa and XanEdu™, free trial subscriptions for both faculty and students will be available through December 31, 2000. Details about the free trial offer for members are available here.
XanEdu™ was launched in July of 2000. The division was created to deliver premium curriculum content and breakthrough courseware products to college and university students and educators on line, on an anywhere, anytime basis. Additional information about XanEdu’s complete portfolio of on-line services for higher education is available on the company’s web site, at www.XanEdu.com.
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