One of the biggest problems that libraries have with promoting access to their subscription databases is that individuals have no idea what is in the database, and why they would want to use them. One of the most obvious audiences for many of the databases are youth who have homework assignments, that they could use information from the databases to complete. But many students think these subscription databases are just the same as the Internet. Showing students what they can find in the databases is the first step to getting them to figure out how to use them.
In createing a tool that would increase student’s motivations to use databases, I wanted to focus less on how to use the tools, and more on what students would find in databases and why they would want to use them. To that end, I selected four databases aimed at students from 4-12 grades, and created a slide show that showcases the types of information these databases produce. Like an advertisement, this slide show is designed to entice students into wanting to learn more, and not to fully explain every step.
I took the slide show I made in Power Point, and hosted it at SlideShare. SlideShare is a free service that takes slide shows created using various software tools, and hosts them. This allows people to view them who do not have the software that the presentation was created with, as well as creating an embeddable file that can be displayed on a webpage for users to view without moving to a new page.