This past summer the Nebraska Library Commission added two new EBSCO K12 databases to its NebraskAccess lineup—MAS Complete and Middle Search Plus. In this post I’d like to introduce you to MAS Complete.
MAS Complete is a research database designed specifically for high school libraries. It provides searchable access to full text articles from 540 periodicals, plus indexing and abstracts of articles from an additional 160 titles. It also boasts 55,000 full-text primary source documents and 75,000 videos from the Associated Press.
When selecting material to include in school databases like MAS Complete, EBSCO’s first priority is making sure it is “educational, age-appropriate (in reading level and context), support[s] curriculum requirements, and [is] applicable to the subjects taught at specific grade levels.” EBSCO takes a multi-pronged approach to this task, consulting publication subscription information, title level reviews, and Lexile® measurements of text, in addition to discussing content needs with both teaching professionals and customers and having staff review each publication. Finally, EBSCO employs both human curation and technology to further fine-tune inclusion decisions.
Because high school students possess a diverse range of academic and developmental needs and abilities, you will find a correspondingly diverse range of materials in MAS Complete. Periodical coverage includes everything from general interest news and entertainment magazines, like TIME, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated, to discipline-specific publications aimed at interested non-professionals, like History Today and Scientific American. Peer-reviewed scholarly journals are included to meet the needs of high ability learners and college-bound upperclassmen, but there is also enough title overlap with Middle Search Plus that students reading below grade level should be able to find accessible content, too.
When using MAS Complete, librarians, teachers, and students will find an array of tools at their fingertips to help focus their searches on just the content that matters to them. Limit options, which can be applied before or after a search, include Full Text, Peer Reviewed, Publication, Publication Date, Source Type, Cover Story, and Lexile® Reading Level. Wielded creatively, they can empower searchers to retrieve vastly different result lists in response to identical initial searches.
MAS Complete is available to search as a stand-alone database using the EBSCOhost interface. It is also one of several databases that can be searched or browsed simultaneously through Explora for High Schools. MAS Complete and Explora for High Schools are available through both the NebraskAccess High School Databases page and the All NebraskAccess Databases page.
