Proquest

Lunar Eclipse
What started out as a result of 20 sources, narrowed down to four when I picked Christopher Columbus, then narrowed even further when I selected publication in the last 10 years. Before I used the "limiters" I scrolled over the choices to see what was available. Patrons researching a particular subject can also limit their sources by location, the type of source, by type of document, wether it's a review or an article or a feature, etc. This make the search for information so much easier. It was always this part that took the longest in research back in the day. . .You would gather up many sources only to find the informtion irrelevent or outdated. At the touch of your fingertips you can limit a resource list to exactly what you need wether the list be 20 or 200.

I wanted to try a search on my own so I typed in a headline I saw on yahoo news about facebook. I limited the date to only the current year, then what type of document. I settled on article and ended up with thirty sources. Scrolling down the page I found the information I was looking for by the third source. Not too shabby.

Lottery Winner
I would search first for lottery winners, then I would ask the patron if they wanted to limit the search to a certain year or time period, if they had perticular states in mind and only US states or provinces as well. This will get them narrowed down pretty well. Also if they had seen a news report sparking their interest, maybe the subject matter as well.