Search Strategies:

Colleen: In this segment, we are going to talk about two concepts related to on-line searching. This first concept is word searching versus subject heading searching. The second concept is how to talk to a database to get the most relevant information out of the database to help you find articles for your research. If you understand these two concepts, you'll have much more luck in finding the information that you need. Let's get started.

Word Searching vs. Subject Heading Searching

This is the Library of Congress down in Washington D.C. People who work here are the ones responsible for coming up with that call number system we talked about earlier that starts with letters rather than numbers.

They also develop subject headings that describe the contents of books on related topics or subjects. Let's take a look at a record for example.

This is a description of a book owned by the BGSU libraries, or in other words, a record for a particular book. Notice the area that is highlighted a different color near the bottom of the screen. This is the subject heading field. This book and others like it share descriptive words to describe the contents of the book or in other words, the same subject heading. When you do a subject heading search, this is the only area or field of the record for this particular book that the computer searches.

When I was down in Washington D.C., I was able to film some of the librarians at the Library of Congress when they were trying to decide what subject heading to assign a set of cook books that they had sitting in front of them. Let's take a look at that right now.

Librarian 1: Hey, I brought some food in for us to give us inspiration to work on this pile of cookbooks we have and figure out the subject headings for them.

Librarian 2: Ok, but remember cookbooks are very similar to a book about motorcycles and you call them motorcycle books people wouldn't be able to understand them.

Librarian 1: Oh, I was hoping we could just use cookbooks.

Librarian 3: What if we use cooking? Would that work?

Librarian 2: Cooking? Then people would think we'd be cooking the books.

Librarian 1: No, that's silly. What about cuisine?

Librarian 3: Then people think you only mean French cooking so what do we do with something like this that includes Malaysian and Argentinean cooking, or this is Russian cooking.

Librarian 2: Well, why don't we use a term I remember finding in the dictionary a while back, which was cookery and listen to the definition, "the art or practice of preparing food." How does that sound?

Librarian 3: I can accept that.

Librarian 1: I like that.

Colleen: I think after seeing that video, you'll realize that subject headings are not always logical and probably not the best place to start when beginning your research. Remember, you should begin your searches with a keyword search and not a subject heading search.

Talking to a database:

Colleen: The second concept I want to talk about is knowing how to talk to a research database. We filmed this student earlier in the day, he was trying to find articles on how advertising impacts teen smoking. Let's take a look at the right now.

Student: (Typing) This library stinks! I can't find anything on my topic.

Colleen: We should have information on the topic that the student is trying to research and getting so frustrated over and we actually do. The student was actually using one of our research databases but let's examine where he could've maybe improved his search to get better results.

You can see here that the student is talking to the database as if he were asking a person a question, "how does advertising impact teen smoking?" Databases don't understand this.

This is an example of a better search. This particular database supports Boolean Operators which consist of and, or, and not. Including these operators along with your keywords ensures that certain terms are included or excluded in the results of your search. By keying in "teens and smoking," you'll be sure to get both terms in your results. They won't necessarily be right next to each other but at least both terms will be included somewhere in the description of the article.

Also remember that there are different ways to describe the word "teenagers." So you'll have to think of synonyms. Here's a few examples for "teenagers" that you could also use: teens, teenagers, adolescents, youth, young adults.

Remember, no two databases work the same way. You'll need to consult the help files to figure out how to talk to that database to get the results that you need.

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