Library Commercial Series
How to Use "Greenfile"
Chris Belter, Librarian, NOAA Central Library
March, 2010

Captioned Text

Hello and welcome to the first install of library series. My name is Chris Belter -- [Phonetic], and today I am going to show you how to use the Ebscohost visual interface. Greenfile is a database that is incurring all of the aspects of the human's impact on the environment. This is a free database, and anybody can use it. So to get to it, type in www.greeninfoonline.com. And you will be taken directly to the interface search page. To click on the visual search option, click on the visual search box. And I am going to search for a broad topic today just to show you how it works. You can do it all sorts of other advanced search techniques, and I am going to search for climate chain, and the results of -- change, and the results of my search are going to show down here at the bottom. As you can see, I have gotten 250 results, and to see more of these results, simply mouse down and the interface will scroll through the articles that you have found. But what makes the visual search interface really great is the subject categories here on top. As you can see it has pulled out several categories to narrow down your search. It includes the top 10 categories from the 250 results. For example, with the climate change, I am interested in the carbon sequestration, and I can click on the subjects category, and it will display a new set of results. Once again, the results are displayed down at the bottom, and then it also takes the top 10 subject categories of the new set and displays them in the new list subject categories that you can also use to narrow down your search. So you can also use the carbon sequestration of United States, for example, simply click on United States, and you can see even more. So within two clicks, I have narrowed it down to three. If you would like to take a different path, package you are interested -- and you are interested in United States to begin with and the import and the export trade, click on it and it will take you to the results that you are interested in. It shows you exactly where you have been. And it also allows you to change the options very easily simply by clicking on a different subject area, you can change your results however you would like.
If you see an article that looks interesting to you, simply click on the box here, and it takes you to the summary of the article and that is the title, the date, the journal, the author, the abstract, et cetera. If you would like to see more detail on this particular detail, you can click on the "more" button down at the bottom, and it will take you to the record page and that will give you all of the information you will want to know about this title. The geographic terms, the full abstract, et cetera.
To get back to your results page, it's important that you do not use your back button on the browser, if you do, that will mess up the system and you will have to redo your search and re-narrow down all of your options. So I highly recommend that you click on the blue arrow here, and it will take you back to the results page and showing you all of selections you have made. If you would like to save an article, you click on it and drag it up to the "collect articles" box, and let it go, and that will save the articles as long as you are in the database. And you can go back and take a completely different path and look at completely different articles, but if you want to look at the articles that you have already saved, click on the green square in the window and it will provide you the article summary. It's also imimportant to click on the -- important to click on the articles and save them up here, because you can print them, e-mail them, or save them or add them to the folder that you would like. If you are not interested in keeping this in here anymore, then you can drag it out of the box and let it go.
If you would like to learn more, click on the "help" tab right hand corner, and go to the search tab and it will give you a step by step demonstration of how to use the database. If you would like to see a initial demonstration of how to use it, you can simply click on the visual search and you don't type anything in the search box, a tutorial will display in the results window to show you all of the things you can do with the site. I highly recommend doing it, there's a lot more in this tutorial and there is a lot more to the visual search interface and there is a lot more than what I have shown you today. Thank you very much for listening to this commercial, and we hope to Sue Oh again -- see you back here again soon.