Shevon, our school’s librarian, visited us again in class.
She further discussed with us reference sources that we can find online. There
was a lot of talk about databases which I found to be boring. I was bored
because I already knew about some of them and know how to navigate them. She
did talk a little bit about Boolean operators, which I hate. No matter how many
different words I use, I never get good results. An example is when searching
in our library catalog for King Arthur books that I needed. Whatever I searched
for, I would only generate a few hits of what books would be useful to me. Then
when I went down into the stacks to find those three hits, lo and behold! There
would be at least another three books that would be useful to me that had never
generated in the search results!? Even though I know about this stuff and try
different words all the time, I can never get good results. The same thing happened
when I visited the graduate library during an info session about grad school. I
saw a whole bunch of King Arthur books that would have been useful for my
thesis, yet they never showed up in the catalog.
Shevon explained
how Boolean operators worked. I knew that putting quotes around words would
mean that those words would be kept together, and I understood that “and” and “or”
meant you would get a search result containing both search words if you used “and”
and you would either get one or the other if you used “or”, but I had no idea
how the parenthesis worked. Finally, I understand! An example that she used were
the search terms “political parties” and “voting”. Searching for Donald Trump
AND (“political parties” OR “voting”) will generate results for sources that mentioned
both Donald Trump and political parties or both Donald Trump and voting, but it
wouldn’t give you results that mentioned Donald Trump, political parties, and
voting all together at the same time.
I did
learn some interesting and useful information though sometimes I was kind of
bored. I learned that back in the day, using Google or Google Scholar was
actually a bad thing. People didn’t trust Google Scholar when it first came out
and a lot of professors didn’t want to get caught looking at it. It’s very hard
to believe considering how important Google services are now and how heavily
they are used. I guess Wikipedia took its place.
I also
learned that though databases say “abstracts” in their name, it’s a legacy
title. The databases used to only contain abstracts, and not articles, but now
that is not true. I wish I had actually known this years ago!
I agree that databases throw a lot of information at you. It is very interesting how they seem to have an emotional connection to the name that no longer accurately describes what you find within that database. Which leaves us with the question of how we can ever find what we need, if we can not find where to look? It seems to me that helping people find where to look, and then how to look will be a major part of any reference librarians job. Those whose job it is to know the databases will be best situated to help others navigate them.
ReplyDeleteI also find shelf reading (the process you describe of going into the stacks and finding related books next to the ones you were looking for) to be more useful at times than Boolean searches or database searches in general. I remember searching in the stacks in my undergraduate library for a specific book for a research project and coming across books that were tangentially related yet super helpful, but they weren't picked up in the database search. I also think, in part, my inability to obtain the books I want was because of my insufficient research skills. Which begs the question, is there such a thing as a "perfect search" (or at least a BETTER search) that can give you the definitive results you need? Is there a specific Boolean combination that would be guaranteed to work for your specified topic? Even so, good shelf reading might still be the overall winner.
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