Advanced Boolean searching of the online catalog

1. Advanced Searching in OSCAR

2. Start at the library homepage: http://www.scu.edu/library/

3. Start at the library homepage: http://www.scu.edu/library/

4. And Again!

8. You will be typing keywords for your search in these four boxes.

9. Choose from among any of these options that are relevant.

10. LOCATION and MATERIAL TYPE are usually just important if you want things OTHER THAN books you can check out

14. Put years in these boxes to find especially recent or old things!

15. Imagine you are going to be writing about how women are portrayed in various recent popular films. You might want to see what books we have about the portrayal of women in film.

16. Imagine you are going to be writing about how women are portrayed in various recent popular films. You might want to see what books we have about the portrayal of women in film. First, ask yourself: What are the most important KEYWORDS in that subject?

17. Imagine you are going to be writing about how women are portrayed in various recent popular films. You might want to see what books we have about the portrayal of women in film. It is important to just use only the most concrete, unambiguous words when searching library databases.

18. Imagine you are going to be writing about how women are portrayed in various recent popular films. You might want to see what books we have about the portrayal of women in film. WOMEN certainly must be one of them.

19. Imagine you are going to be writing about how women are portrayed in various recent popular films. You might want to see what books we have about the portrayal of women in film. WOMEN certainly must be one of them. FILM must be another.

20. Imagine you are going to be writing about how women are portrayed in various recent popular films. You might want to see what books we have about the portrayal of women in film. Is there a third? Would it be portrayed ? Or portrayal ? WOMEN certainly must be one of them. FILM must be another.

21. Imagine you are going to be writing about how women are portrayed in various recent popular films. You might want to see what books we have about the portrayal of women in film. Does it really matter?

22. YES!!!!

23. In these library databases little things like word endings can make a HUGE difference in search results.

24. But, you’ll be happy to know that there is a very easy way to handle things like that.

25. It’s a little device called TRUNCATION.

26. At the point where the spelling changes . . .after the Y in this case . . . you put an asterisk, *.

27. portray * will get you portray , portray s, portray ed, portray al, portray ing, and so forth!

28. In fact, we should also use the asterisk/truncation with film : film*

29. So, we have 3 ideas to put in those 4 boxes.

30. Think of each box as being a place to put an IDEA in your research topic.

31. The ideas/boxes are connected by the Boolean operator And .

32. The ideas/boxes are connected by the Boolean operator And .

33. Put women in one box.

34. Put film * in another.

35. And, finally, put portray * in the third.

36. And, finally, put portray * in the third. & click

38. We found 6 items

39. Let’s scroll down and scan a few titles . . .

41. The word women is in two titles . . .

42. But I don’t see film * or portray * anywhere

43. We will need to look at FULL RECORDS to see where those words appear.

44. So, let’s choose a title and click on it.

45. How about the 2 nd one? It mentions cinema .

47. These 1 st 3 fields have all the information you need to CITE this book in your paper.

48. These 1 st 3 fields have all the information you need to CITE this book in your paper.

49. Where, though, do our three search words appear?

50. One, women , is in the Subject field.

51. One, women , is in the Subject field.

52. And, also 3 times in the Contents .

53. And, film is all over the Contents .

54. One form of the word portray* is in the Contents as well.

55. What is that field Contents anyway?

56. It is the Titles of the Chapters in the book.

57. Of those 6 books we found, some will only have chapters that are relevant.

58. The field to look at more closely, though, is Subject(s) .

59. Only one of the 3 words we searched appears here as a Subject .

60. That is women .

61. But, another one of our IDEAS appears here. Do you see it?

62. Isn’t motion pictures another way to say film* ?

63. Think of the words here in Subject(s) as your POWER words!

64. It’s like learning another language! It is, in fact, a special vocabulary from the Library of Congress.

65. Although the word films maybe be used in the REAL WORLD more often than the phrase motion pictures… when you are using library databases, it is the Library of Congress that rules!

66. So, now we know that the Library of Congress likes women and motion pictures , what about that 3 rd idea? Portray * ?

67. You aren’t always going to find words among the Subjects for all your ideas. Searching isn’t always going to work like with women and motion pictures . So, you are going to have to look a little longer for ideas like portray*. For some ideas, you will have to rely a lot on words you find in Titles and Contents fields. This is one of those cases!

68. So, we need to look at a few more FULL RECORDS . . . Scroll up to the top of the screen . . .

69. And, click on

70. Do any of these titles particularly convey the idea of portrayal ?

71. Maybe this one?

72. Click on it to look at the full record.

73. The SUBJECTS here do not have a distinctive word for the idea of portrayal either.

74. A closer look at some of the chapter titles DOES suggest other words for the idea of portrayal , though.

77. So, we have learned a lot about the language to use in searching for information about the portrayal of women in films .

81. So, let’s scroll up a bit . . .

82. And click on

83. We are back at our original search.

84. We can make some significant changes to this search, using what we just learned about search language.

85. Specifically about alternatives to film* and to portray*

86. Our alternative to film* was the phrase ”motion pictures”

87. Alternatives are added using the Boolean connector or

88. Alternatives are added using the Boolean connector or

89. Critical small detail – notice that the phrase, motion pictures , requires the use of “ “

90. Let’s do the same with our 2 additional alternatives to portray*

91. You can just keep typing even though it looks like you are running out of space. The box expands.

93. When you are using both the Boolean and & the Boolean or , you need to put parentheses around those or statements.

94. (film* or “motion pictures”) ( portray* or stereotyp* or represent* )

95. Thus . . .

96. Thus . . . & click

97. We went from 6 to 44.

98. The first few titles look a little broad . . .

99. As we saw in earlier examples, our search words are probably in the titles of some of the CHAPTERS of these books.

100. 44 is actually a very good number of records to review.

101. And chapters are quite nice to find!

102. Well, there’s a lot more to learn about ADVANCED searching, but, this should be enough to get you started.