ELAC has online access to many more periodicals than the library receives in print. When you use an online article database, it quickly scans thousands of issues of many different periodicals to find a match for your search terms.

A database will show you which periodicals have articles on your topic.

Without an article database, you would have to look through each issue of every periodical for articles on your topic. That would take much longer than learning to use an article database!