UNKNOWN ITEM SEARCHING IN THE CATALOG

Most of you have used a library catalog before. A library catalog is simply a list of items held by the library that have been classified, indexed, and arranged. When you are researching a topic, you normally want to check the library catalog first to see if the library has books that will be useful to you. 

Normally, when you are researching topic, you will be searching for unknown items.  This means you want to see what books are available on the subject you are researching.  Examples of unknown items might be coaching track, the Mexican Revolution, or sleep disorders. If you are looking for books by Mark Twain or the novel The Great Gatsby, you are searching for known items and are better off using on the author-title screen as you did in the first part of this lesson.  For unknown items, use the default guided search screen.

Performing an initial guided search for a topic is intuitive and easy.  Just type in your terms and hit the search button.  Once you have located the call number of a book on subject you are interested in, you can normally find others on the shelf beside it.

The main thing to remember is that terms equal concepts.  You don't want to write a sentence or a phrase.  You want to type in one or two words per line that relate to the subject.

Don't write "best methods for coaching track and field" because you won't find anything and you'll get an error message.  Instead type "coaching track".  Look through your list.  If the list is too long, follow the methods below to narrow it down.  If you don't get anything, think of another concept that describes your topic.             

1- Truncating.  Truncating means to cut short.  In searching when you cut off part of a word and replace it with a symbol, the search engine will locate all the words that start with those letters.  The truncation symbol used in the catalog is ?.  Using truncation will broaden your search.

Example of truncation in the catalog:  ethic? will find ethic, ethics and ethical.  Californi? will find California, Californian, Californio, Californians.

2- Type of search: The pull down menu next the "find" box allows you to establish the kind of search you want to perform.  These are "any of these," "all of these," or "as a phrase." "Any of these" searches will find any word from a string of words you type in.  In other words if you type "Mexican Revolution" and "any of these," it will find every record containing the word "Mexican" and every record containing the word "revolution".  Obviously, it would find a lot of items, but most of them would have nothing to do with the Mexican Revolution.

Normally, you only use the "any of these" option if you are looking for synonyms, like this:  Search: |feline cat| any of these

"All of these" is the default search and the best one for most searches.  If you enter two terms on a line, it will search to determine if two or more terms are present and then retrieve the record

"As a phrase" is the third type of search.  It finds the words together in the search.  One way you narrow a search of Mexican revolution, for example, is to set it as a phrase.

3- Setting limits: The limit button allows you to perform a search for books in a specific collection or language or within a specific time frame.  For example, if you are interested in searching for reference books, books in Spanish or books written after 2005, you could limit your search to these items.

TEST YOUR UNDERSTANDING