Biography Resource Center
Opposing ViewpointsResourceCenter
July2007
Opposing Viewpoints Resource Centeris the premier online resource covering today’s hottest social issues, from Terrorism to Endangered Species, Stem Cell Research to Gun Control. OVRC brings together all the information that’s needed to fully understand an issue: pro and con viewpoint articles, reference articles that provide context, 140 full-text magazines, academic journals, and newspapers, primary source documents,government and organizational statistics, multimedia, including images and podcasts, and links to hand-selected web sites.
The target audiences for OVRC are students completing assignments for Social Studies, English Composition and Speech, Science and Health, and Current Event and Debate classes. OVRC helps to develop critical thinking and information literacy skills---paramount in national and state curriculum standards---by helping students research, analyze, and organize various types of data for research assignments, persuasive essays, and debates.OVRC is intended for students ingrades 6-12 and above, and anyone of any age interested in exploring social issues.
At a Glance…
►NEW!OVRC available on the GALE PowerSearch platform:Allows users to quickly and easily find relevant search results across Gale eproducts--in one seamless search.
►NEW!Student-friendly user interface for stand-alone product:Includes features targeted to students and educators such as Curriculum Standards Search and Lexile reading levels.
►NEW!National and State Curriculum Standards Search with correlated content:Allows educators to quickly identify material by grade and discipline. Curriculum Standards in OVRC include National and State Standards for Social Studies and Science for grades 6-12.
►NEW!Lexile reading levels for periodicals: To support reading initiatives and testing, 75 of the top-searched periodicals have been assigned Lexile scores going back to January 2004; the rest are Lexiled beginning May 2006. This is a configurable feature; Lexiles can be turned off.
►NEW!Choice of three popular topic picklists:For flexibility in displaying controversial topics, customers can now select one of three topic picklists:List A includes all topics; List Bexcludes topics related to sexual behavior;List C excludes topics related to sexual behavior and alcohol and drug abuse.The content remains in OVRC, but is accessible only through searches, not the topic picklist.
►NEW!“Keyword in context” within results list: Offers users a glimpse into the article so they can easily determine the relevance of each search result.
►NEW!Translation feature:Allows users to translate documents intoSpanish, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, simplified Chinese, and Korean. A new interface preferencealso allows users to display the interface in Spanish, French, or Portuguese.
►NEW!Content levels:Content labeled Basic, Intermediate, and Advancedto help readers choose appropriate content for their abilities. These content levels are configurable and can be turned off.
►NEW!MARC recordsthat link to library holdings will be available on in summer 2007.
►Infomark functionalitythatallowsfor copying, bookmarking, and emailing the URLs of search screens, search results, and individual documents, making it easy to create, share, and update reading lists, bibliographies, course packs, and more
►Search paths: Available search functionality includes Basic Search, Subject Guide Search, Publication Search, and Advanced Search. Search by subject, keyword, or entire document (full text).
►24/7 access: Electronic format provides 24/7 access to the library’s shelves.
Stellar Content…
OVRC contains 450 proprietary Greenhaven Press, GALE, Macmillan, Scribner, and U·X·L titles (worth more than $17,000). Included in the database are:
►400 titles from6 Greenhaven print series:Opposing Viewpoints, Opposing Viewpoints Digests,At Issue, Contemporary Issues Companion, Current Controversies, and Teen Decisions.
►38 complete titles from Gale’sInformation Plus reference series of statistics, government data, and information on legislation and public policy.
►15 proprietary GALEsets:Activists, Rebels, and Reformers; Civil Rights in the United States; Current Issues; Drugs and Controlled Substances: Information for Students;Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy; Environmental Encyclopedia; Federal Agency Profiles for Students; Great American Court Cases; Special Interest Group Profiles for Students; Tsunamis;Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations: United Nationsvolume and selections from Bioethics for Students; Encyclopedia of Sociology; Macmillan Compendium: Social Issues; and Macmillan Profiles: Humanitarians and Reformers.
OVRC contains:
►More than8,730 pro and conviewpoint articles
►More than 4,700topic overviews that provide context for the issues
►More than 375primary source documents
►300 biographies of social activists and reformers
►More than 775 court-case overviews
►334 profiles of federal agencies and special interest groups
►More than 140full-text magazines, academic journals, and newspapers (nearly 2.2 million articles), including theNew York Times, Time, Newsweek,U.S. News & World Report, and Wilson Quarterly.Backfile to 1983.
►More than6,500 statistical tables, charts, and graphswith explication
►More than 1,500 images, all hand-selected to support the topics covered, as well as an embedded link toGoogle Image Search
►2,300 links to reviewed and subject-indexed web sites
►Thousands of podcasts, including the weekly presidential radio address and podcasts from such premier NPR programs as Morning Edition and All Things Considered
►Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
►Research Tools and Research Guide that tie information literacy skills to use of the database. These tools help students organize their thoughts and analyze information to create comprehensive and focused reports, debates, and other assignments.
Continuously Updated…
► Updating:The content in OVRC is updated on different schedules, depending on the type of content:
► Magazines, Academic Journals, and Newspapers are updated daily.
► New editions of the Greenhaven series that populate the "Viewpoints" tab are added quarterly, with all the content completely updated every 3 years. When new editions are added, older editions remain in the database to provide recent historical context. Starting in Fall 2006, all articles that appear in print will also appear online.
► New editions of Information Plus titles, which populate the "Statistics" tab, are updated twice yearly, with all the content replaced every two years.
► Reference content, Primary Documents, and Multimedia are updated on an as-needed basis. New content is added yearly to support the National Debate Topic or to address hot topics (for instance, after the Indonesian tsunami we added Greenhaven's Tsunamis to the dataset).
► New web sites are added at least twice yearly.
Rave Reviews…
►OVRC was a finalist for the prestigious CODiE Award for Best Education Reference or Search Serviceby the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) in 2007.
►OVRCwas named toMedia & Methods Magazine's 2005 Awards Portfolio for its “commitment and creativity in the production of outstanding educational resources and services for educators worldwide.”
►OVRC received this review in the School Library Journal's August 2005 issue: “The plethora and depth and range of information returned leaves few questions unanswered. OVRC provides comprehensive coverage of hundreds of subjects ranging from ongoing controversies to today’s hot-button issues and will assist students with their research in all subjects, not just the social sciences. They will find it to be exciting, easy to navigate, and very student-friendly.”
►And in April 2002, Naples, Florida, High School Library Media Specialist Adam Janowski wrote to his colleagues on LM_Net: "OpposingViewpointsResourceCenter is one of those rare resources that elicits `AWESOME' from students. We've been previewing the product for a few weeks now with sociology, speech and debate, and senior thesis students and the reaction has been incredible. I am actually seeing them go to Opposing Viewpoints rather than Google and Yahoo.... The online version has the viewpoints articles along with statistics, websites and reference and magazine/newspaper articles. I would highly recommend that you preview this resource."
Frequently Asked Questions
►What are Lexile® reading levelsand how do customers use them in OpposingViewpointsResourceCenter?
The Lexile® reading level (or scale),developed by MetaMetrics, Inc., is a developmental and educational tool designed to match a reader's skills to texts. The Lexile score rates the difficulty of text based on word frequency and sentence length. A score is displayed as a number followed by an L, such as 850L.The reading level assigns a category to a range of scores. For example, scores below 200L are considered beginning-reader material, while scores above 1700L are considered advanced (i.e., at the college level).
Lexile measures are the most widely adopted reading measures in use today. Tens of thousands of books and tens of millions of newspaper and magazine articles have Lexile measures – more than 450 publishers Lexile their titles. In addition, all major standardized reading tests and many popular instructional reading programs can report student reading scores in Lexiles. As a result, Lexile measures tie day-to-day work in the classroom to critical high-stakes tests. Each year, millions of students receive a Lexile measure at school.
Lexile scores are configurable in OVRC: they default to “on,” meaning they appear unless customers choose to turn them off in ITConfig. When enabled, Lexile scores are displayed as part of the citation on the tabbed results list for documents from magazines, academic journals, and news sources; they also appear in the citation of these documents. Customers can also use Advanced Search to limit search results by Lexilescore and reading level; they can also Refine Results on the periodicals tab so that their results contain only documents with the Lexile reading level they select. The limit only applies to periodical content.
►What is the Curriculum Standards Search? How are state and national standards correlated to content in the database?
GALE’s Curriculum Standards Search links national and state standards for grades 6-12 to content within OpposingViewpointsResourceCenter. Using Gale’s Curriculum Standards Search, a teacher can select his/her state location (or one of the provided national standards) and link directly to a list of broad curriculum benchmarks or standards that the state has designed for use in middle and/or high school classrooms. Clicking on one of these broad benchmarks or standards takes the user to the specific criteria or standards that students are expected to understand.
Gale indexes each individual standard to one or more subject terms within our highly acclaimed subject vocabulary. New articles are added to the database on a daily basis, and each time a Curriculum Standards Search is run, the most recent articles on a particular subject on any given day are included, making it a highly dynamic tool.
This powerful tool will enable teachers and media specialists to identify content in OpposingViewpointsResourceCenter that correlates to their individual state standards, or to national standards, and that can be used to complement lesson plans designed to meet those state standards. Offering a variety of articles correlated to each standard allows teachers to choose the articles that best meet their needs and offers flexibility as they use the database in conjunction with their lesson plans.
Questions?
Contact:
Carol Nagel
Product Management
GALE
Direct line: (248)699-8777; Toll-free: (800)347-4253, ext. 8777
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