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Major Enhancements to SIRS Researcher® Help Students Make Sense of Social Issues
SIRS Decades® Completes Addition of 20th Century Content
ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN, February 1, 2006 -- ProQuest Information and Learning announced today the completion of major enhancements to SIRS Researcher®, a one-stop reference solution providing thousands of full-text articles that explore social, scientific, health, historic, business, economic, political, and global issues. The newly re-launched SIRS Researcher helps students make sense of the current and enduring social issues affecting their world.
SIRS Researcher features nearly 100 Leading Issues, plus thousands of topical issues. SIRS covers enduring issues such as capital punishment, gun control, and pollution, as well as today’s most current issues such as evolution, doping in sports, and same-sex marriage. The Your Top 10 list features the ten most-accessed Leading Issues for the previous month.
All Leading Issues are now accessible from the primary search screen. Leading Issues' non-divisive, unbiased editorial approach allows students to build critical thinking skills and form their own opinions by seeing all sides of an issue – pro, con, and everything in between. Also, the new Pro/Con and myAnalysis tabs make exploring the opposing viewpoints easier. New Leading Issues curriculum guides walk students through the research process, utilizing Leading Issues as a primary source of information.
In addition to a cleaner and more visually sophisticated interface, SIRS Researcher has a new That's Debatable feature. This allows students to vote in an online poll and become vested in the research process. This month’s poll has had more than 40,000 responders to date.
Other new features include targeted image searching and My Research Links. Special Features such as Maps of the World, Today's News, Spotlights, ChallengeQuests, Educator’s Resources, and Research Guides have also been given more prominent placement for easy access.
SIRS Decades® Now CompleteSIRS Decades® has completed its collection of 20th century content with the addition of content and topics for the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Sample topics include:
- End of the Vietnam War
- Watergate—Break-in and Cover-Up
- Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War
- Reaganomics
- Clinton and the Republican Congress
- Foreign Policy and Terrorism
- The Age of the Internet
SIRS Decades provides more than 5,000 hand-selected articles, highlighting key events, movements, people and places in 20th Century America. Documents span a wide range of formats – letters and memos, editorial cartoons, illustrations, ads and articles – with some being released from ProQuest’s UMI vault for the first time in digital format. Organized by decade and topic, SIRS Decades places primary and secondary sources into a curriculum-oriented framework that builds a relevant context for understanding, enriching the content and students’ experience with the material.
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