Class notes for academic database search lecture and search strategy project

1. Monday, February 10 2014
DTC 356

3. First Order
“A Geography of Knowledge”
Physical objects can only be in one place at a time
Forced choice

5. Problems of Scale
What happens when you get more books than will fit
on the shelf?
What happens when you have too many shoes to fit in
your closet?
What happens when you can’t remember what you put
in the boxes in your garage?

6. Second Order
Making a list helps solve problems of scale
Inventory
Tables, records, fields

8. Text
Scholarly Databases
information in silos
CC Attribution Share-Alike photo by Leaflet

9. What is Scholarship?
Independently verifiable results requires independent
verification
Epistolary Scholarship
Oldenberg and the Royal Society / Journal de Scavans

10. Journals & Disciplines
People studying the same things published in the same
journals
As scholarship grew, disciplines built around these
journals
When it scaled up: we got academic databases
(People read all the journals in a discipline and created
a searchable database of that scholarship.)

11. Sample
Record
(see the entire
record)

12. Searching a Scholarly DB
Once you know the fields in the record, you can find
what you need.
Full-text searching wasn’t available at first. (Only search
what is in the record.)
Indexing and Abstracting

13. Searching a DB
Field Searching
Controlled Vocabulary
Citation Analysis
Search Operators: (Boolean, Wildcard, Truncation, etc.)

14. Search Strategy Project
3 parts:
1500 word analysis of a WSU library database
500 word search narrative
Media guide to using the database
Assignment Instructions