Marvel – Kids Search

Another wonderful database provided in Marvel.

Kids Search is, as you may have guessed, geared toward the younger user.  It searches several sources at once. 

My first search was “elephant”, using the search bar on the first page.  This brought up over 1800 results!  Next I was given the opportunity to Filter Results By.  My choices were All Results, Magazines, Newspapers, Books & Encyclopedias, Animals, Biographies, Radio & TV News Transcripts, and Primary Source Documents. WOW! Where do I begin to filter??

I clicked on Biographies, and narrowed my search to 15 results, all of these being from electronic encyclopedias.  Scanning through the list, some of the articles give a Lexile number for those folks who need to know what reading level an article is written.  All of the articles happen to be available in Full Text, so clicking on an article brings up the entire article, and I was given the opportunity to Print, E-mail, Save, or Add to folder.  Adding to my folder saves the search for later, so if you are not connected to a printer, you can access the article easily.  Another option here is the Sort By option.  Clicking this drop down box gave me the choices – Relevance, Date Descending, Date Ascending, and Source.  I was also able to Narrow Results By Subjectand Publication.

Moving back to the previous page, filtering my results by Animal gave me 22 results.  These results also give Lexile numbers, and all appear to be Full Text articles, a couple with graphics.  I still had the Sort By options, but the Narrow Results By option is now only Subject.

Primary Source Documents was the next filtering tool I used.  Of the 15 articles, only 2 of them had Lexile numbers, all of them were Full Text articles, and as primary source documents, generally written as first person accounts.  A couple of these articles are Congressional Testimony, which adds an interesting bit to our research.  Here the Sort By options are still the same, but the Narrow Results By option is only Publication.

Photos was my next filtering choice.  Here we have over 300 thumbnail pictures of elephants, with description and source citation.  On this page, Sort By options have lessened, my choices are now Relevance and Title, and there are no Narrow Results By options.

This looks like a WONDERFUL resource for anyone needing information.  It may be titled Kids Search, but . . . . chronologically, I’m no “kid” and I will use this site!!