WMNET Workshop

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JISC Collections for Schoolswww.keesings.com

• WMNET Workshop
• Fran Alexander, Editor
• Lorna Meaney, Online Editor

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Overview

• What is Keesings Record of World Events?
• Keesing's Editorial Principles
• Why is Keesings Useful?
• How to Search the Keesings Archive
• Online Features
• Keesings as a Teaching Resource
• Summary
• Questions Hands-on Exercises

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What is Keesings Record of World Events?
Keesings is neither a newspaper nor a magazine.
It is a reference resource recording facts and
events in order to form a continuous political,
social, and economic archive since 1931.  
Elections and changes of government Wars and
conflicts Terrorism and issues of internal
security National legislation and budgets
Actions by the UN and other international
organisations World Bank and IMF lending
activities Diplomacy Scientific
discoveries and Space exploration Natural
disasters and environmental issues Economic
developments Treaties and international
agreements
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Keesing's editorial principles

• Internationalism
• Accuracy
•  
• Permanence
• Objectivity

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Why is Keesings Useful?

• Keesing's is a distillation of political news
  into easily digestible chunks, but written as an
  ongoing narrative.
•  
• Keesing's provides clear unbiased facts in an
  easily accessible form.
• The Keesing's online archive is the quickest
  and most rational way of accessing 77 years of
  Keesings articles covering every country of the
  world.
•  
• It is a fully searchable database containing
  over 100,000 reports and something over 70
  million words, expanding at a rate of over 1,500
  articles and 600,000 words per year.
•  

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How to Search the Keesings Archive (1) Basic
Searching

• The entire Keesing's Archive is online, fully
  searchable and indexed.
• Type a word into the search box and click the
  arrow or hit "return.
• The results page will then display summary
  headlines of all the articles containing that
  word

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How to Search the Keesings Archive (2)
Searching By Date

• Limit from/ Limit to
• To reduce the number of results and form a more
  targeted search, you can limit the date range of
  articles searched
• Date type
• You can limit results by two types of date
  publication date, or date within an article.
• 1) Dates found in article
• By using the Dates found in article option, you
  could search for articles containing a particular
  date.
• 2) Article publication date
• - You can sort your results according to the
  date when each article was published
• You can also choose to sort your results either
  by newest (most recently published) articles
  first, or by oldest first.

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How to Search the Keesings Archive (3) Tips
and Tricks

• Use Boolean search terms
• Use the character (asterisk) as a wildcard to
  represent any letters in the search
• If you want to exclude a word from the search
  you can key (hyphen) to mean NOT. A search of
  "budget" - "provisional" will find all the
  articles that contain the word "budget" that do
  not contain the word "provisional".
• Try different spellings
• Try different forms of a word
• Try a broader search and alternative terms.
• Try acronyms or abbreviations instead of the full
  name

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Online Features 1 Breaking History
The Keesings website offers IP controlled
access to the 77 year archive in an electronic
format, with over 100,000 fully searchable
articles. The site also hosts Breaking History,
a series of articles which provide comprehensive
context on breaking stories from around the
world. These free articles provide comprehensive
context on news from around the world.
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Online Features 2 Topic Keywords

• The Keesings online archive offers various
  features which help you to organise your
  research

Topic keywords All Keesing's articles are
given thematic topic keywords by a member of the
Keesing's editorial team, and these keywords help
to identify each article's content. By choosing
one of the 17 themes, you can select from your
search results only the articles relevant to your
research.
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Online Features 3 Clusters

• Clusters
• Clusters are groups of articles that mention the
  same country or person.
• Nations
• People
• Using clusters lets you obtain faster, more
  comprehensive results as it searchers for various
  forms of a persons or countrys name.

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Online Features 4 Personalise Your Search

• Portfolios
• Users can build up portfolios of articles useful
  to their research, tag interesting information
  for themselves, and share these tags with other
  users.
• User-created tags
• All registered users of the Keesing's archive can
  add their own tags to articles. Tags allow you to
  identify and mark themes or subjects of interest
  to you, making the tagging system completely
  personal.

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Keesings as a Teaching Resource 1

• Use Keesing's to teach History
• Summarises events month by month
• Quickly research events
• Clear and concise
• Use Keesing's to teach Government Politics
• Keesings covers constitutional, electoral and
  legislative issues in greater detail than in UK
  newspapers.
• Illustrates the development of electoral and
  governmental systems.

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Keesings as a Teaching Resource 2

• Use Keesing's to teach ICT
• Show students how to access online
  information.
• Shows students how to construct a search query
  and sort results.
• Show students how to tag articles to help
  organise and retrieve information.
• Use Keesing's to teach Citizenship Use the
  Keesings topic keywords to research a number of
  Key Stage 3 and 4 Citizenship units
• Relevant Keesings topic keywords Constitution
  Governance Elections Environment Foreign
  Relations Human Rights International
  Organisations
• Use Keesing's to teach Economics and Business
  Studies
• Budgets
• Commodities
• Relevant Keesings topic keywords Budgets
  International Organisations

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Keesings as a Teaching Resource 3

• Use Keesing's to teach Sociology
• Example The migration of white people from
  Zimbabwe
• Relevant Keesings topic keywords Social
  Issues Legal Issues
• Use Keesing's to teach Law
• Example Acquittal of Omagh bombing suspects
• Relevant Keesings topic keywords Legislation
  Legal Issues.
• Use Keesing's to teach English and Media Studies
  
• By comparing Keesing's articles with other online
  resources, such as online newspaper and TV sites,
  teachers can show how articles are written in
  different ways and for for different reasons.

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Telegraph Fuel Article 30/06/08
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Summary
Keesings provides an International, Accurate,
Objective and Permanent record of world
events. It is wholly suitable for classroom
teaching, private study and research for students
from 14. The online database offers
cutting-edge Web features allowing online
collaboration between teachers and students.  
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PPT screenshots

• www.keesings.com
• User name JISC2008
• Password  access

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Searching for 11-13 Sept 2001 Pentagon
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Articles that Discuss Human Rights in Burma
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Electoral Mandates in Brazil
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Budgets from Around the World
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Commodities Uranium Production
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The Telegraph Emotive, biased language
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Compare with Keesings a similar unbiased
perspective
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The Migration of White People from Zimbabwe
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The Acquittal of Omagh Bombing Suspect