I did my study of the Britannica Academic Edition. I wanted something global for a current event so I chose "Euro-zone debt crisis". This was a great topic and I found a long list of results. I noticed that on the right side I could see brief summaries; clicking on the title brought up the full article. The left side many features. I especially liked the images. Sometimes I find it hard to navigate through databases, but the Britannica was intuitive and easy to use. On the left side, I found links to journal articles, as well as web links. This is important for the college student since they usually have to cite several different types of sources.

Article history was interesting: I could see all the updates the author has made, important for currency requirements. The contributor info especially interested me. Who actually writes for the Britannica? Well I assumed at least a PhD in a topic, but NO...this author has a BA and is a staff copy editor for the Britannica. This astounded me. Could I write for the Britannica? And why is this any better than Wikipedia, forbidden in academic research?

I created a workspace for myself and played around with it. While I liked it for my research conducted only in BAE, I don't think our college students would use it. As I said before, they need to use many sources and would probably email or print their findings. They would like the citation guide at the bottom of the article. I think this would be a great starting point for college students, instead of Wikipedia or Google, but they would have to go on to other databases, websites, and books to complete their research.