Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjJcrHV2NWI

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Hi everyone, I just wanted to welcome you to the webinar tonight. It is going to start about five minutes from now. I just wanted to welcome you all and let you know you're in the right place. We will have a few more attendees coming on in the next four to five minutes. If you all hang tight, we will start about 8:30 PM. In the meantime, feel free to look over the housekeeping slide that is up and we will go over that shortly. Thanks for attending.

 

Hi everyone, we are going to start the webinar. We are going to do a little bit of housekeeping before we begin to make sure that we give some of the other students a chance to hop in on the webinar. A few housekeeping things -- before I start, Julie, can you just give me a sound check and monitor check, make sure you can hear me and you can see my screen okay?

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  Sounds good to me. One or two of the participants could answer in the question box, that would be helpful. Thank you.

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Thanks. A few housekeeping things first. Hopefully you had a chance to read the slide while you were waiting. There is a PowerPoint and handout available in the Handouts section that you can download and save to your computer. I recommend doing that. The session is going to be recorded. In the next slide, we will be recording that. You will be getting a link to the recording in the next day or two, so look for that.

 

We will answer webinar related questions at the end of the webinar, so you can type it in to the questions box that you see there. And, if you have any other related questions, you can send them to our Ask a Librarian service in either email or chat with us. Once you download the PowerPoint, you will be able to access those links on your screen. Closed captioning is going to be available. You will see that in the chatbox. If you are interested in using closed captioning, please feel free to do that.

 

It looks like we have a few more attendees, so we're going to get started.

 

Julie and I are going to turn on our WebCams real quick so we can introduce ourselves and you can put a face to a name. That is me and that is Julie, below me. As a reminder, Julie, once we are done with introductions, if you would like to start the recording, that would be great.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  I have started the recording.

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Thank you. You are in the Mysteries of the Library:  Revealed! Search Terms webinar. My name is Andrea and I am a Reference Librarian here at Walden University. Julie James is here with me, she will be helping me present and field questions. She is one of our Health Services librarians here at Walden. If you use our Ask a Librarian service, send us emails or chat with us, you will often see our names as well. Now you can put some faces with the names. Hopefully we have worked with some of you before, if not, we will work with you in the future. We are going to turn off our WebCams, because it uses a little bit of bandwidth. We wanted to say hi, now we will say goodbye.

 

Let's get started. If you have attended these Mysteries of the Library Revealed in the past, terrific. If this is your first one, you have picked an excellent one. This is the basis of just about everything you are going to do in the library. We hold these webinars once a month on the third Monday at 8:30 in the evening. We have two more scheduled, June 18 and July 16, Search Alerts and Journals. Just a reminder, even if you are not sure you can attend the webinar, please do register. Because what happens is you will get a link to the webinars a few days after. So it's just a good reminder to watch it if, for some reason, you weren't able to attend. Just a few reminders there.

 

Like I said, if this is your first Mysteries webinar you are attending you picked an excellent one, because everything we do with library databases depends on keywords.

 

These are the objectives that hopefully you are going to leave with tonight at the end of the webinar.

 

First is identifying keywords in an assignment prompt or research topic.

 

Combining keywords to narrow or broaden your search results.

 

And then to develop more keywords, you can use subject terms and, we are going back a little old-school and using a thesaurus.

 

So those two we'll be covering as well, and as well as using field searching to search a specific article.

 

Julie, as a reminder, you can mute your mic, I think we might be picking up your keyboard. You are a fast typer and I can hear those keys going. We are all impressed over here!

 

If you have ever used our Ask a Librarian service, we might send you a sample or example search and will always say the first thing, develop some keywords.

 

Let's talk about what a keyword is and isn't. That is really the basis of what we are going to do.

 

To show you what a keyword is and isn't, sometimes it's easier to show you an example. I am going to bring up on the screen a handout that is also available for you to download. This works through the search that we're going to do in the first half of the webinar.

 

Let's assume this is our assignment prompt up here. The first part of it is, "What are teachers' attitudes on standardized testing?"

 

If we copy that and go over to Google, for instance, we can type the whole sentence into Google including the question mark, punctuation, and it is going to bring us relatively relative results. Not always. It is going to bring us up over 2 million results. You can see, some are Journal articles at the top. Most of these are not going to be in full text but it is going to refer to them. And these are going to be teacher resources here at the bottom. So you will get a variety of different things. That is because Google is set up to use more natural language searching to pick these things up in websites and website coding and those kinds of things. That is how Google works.

 

Let's go over to our library databases and see what happens if we were to do the same thing in a library database.

 

We are not going to talk really much about library databases tonight, per se. That is another Mysteries webinar that is recorded that you can watch. But just a reminder, we typically start here in this box under Subject Resources and we pick a topic most related to what we are searching. So we are going to click on Education.

 

That is going to bring us to our Education page where everything you need to know about the Walden Library and education resources is on this page.

 

So this first drop-down menu, we are going to pick one of the best-bet databases. The first one listed is Education Resources here. We are going to pick that.

 

And hopefully, you're familiar with this layout. The database is Education Source, but it is an EBSCO database, which means that is the company that sells us this product. So the interface is really the same with a lot of our EBSCO databases.

 

Let's go ahead and type the whole thing in to the search box and click Search.

 

Wonderful. We get absolutely no results compared to 2 million in Google.

 

Well, that's honestly one of the reasons why students opt to use Google instead of databases, is because they're not sure how, why they are getting zero results and how the database is working. They are much more familiar with Google.

 

The reason that is is because keywords. All keywords means is we need to break down the sentence into ideas and concepts that we are going to put in to each separate box.

 

So the best way to explain that is to show you what I mean by that.

 

So, let me delete this, and we are going to start from the beginning. And, delete. There we go.

 

So, if we are to look back at our topic, "What are teachers' attitudes about standardized testing?" one of the main ideas is Teachers. So we are going to type that into the first search box.

 

The next is attitudes. So we are getting rid of all the what, ands, question marks, punctuation, and breaking it down into one idea per search box. And, the last one was standardized testing.

 

Typically when we search our databases, just as a reminder, we typically click full text and peer-reviewed. It might depend based on your assignment. But just a reminder we usually click those two checkboxes off.

 

Let's click Search and see what happens. Great, we get 74 results here. A lot more than zero and a lot less than 2 million. We are doing pretty good right out of the gates.

 

This is a pretty basic search. This is how you start off. If you are new to using the library and you get this far and you can complete your assignment, terrific. But we are going to go into a few more advanced skills that hopefully you will be able to use as you progress in a course of study here at Walden.

 

If we were to look back at the prompt, we are going to ignore part of it, but the second part says, "Choose a research article that focuses on a specific methodology of your interest."

 

Well, let's say that you're a dissertation student and were interested in case studies and you want to know more about what the format of the case study looks like. We are going to go ahead and click the plus button over here and that is going to give us one more search box.

 

Now, we have 74 results because our search is pretty broad. So we are going to type in case study ... and as a reminder, and this is all also on the PowerPoint, is that the more words you enter into the search boxes, the more narrow your results because of this AND over here. We are telling the database we want to find only articles that have the word teachers AND attitudes AND standardized testing AND, now, case study.

 

If it is missing one of those words, it's not going to bring up the article. So, now that our articles, once we click Search, we went from 74, now we have "case study" and let's see what happens. Wow. Okay. That reduced it quite a bit to four results. Because the article has to mention all four of those.

 

If you were able to download the PowerPoint, if not, it's all there at all in the handout.

 

The second step to developing a really great search in our databases is to start brainstorming all the synonyms and related concepts you can think of. The reason for that is because these articles mention the word teachers. But what if they mention educators or instructors or professors? So we are going to brainstorm as many alternatives as we can think of and separate with them with this OR. I am going to explain what that means. But we are going to separate them all by the word OR.

 

What else can you think of, as far as attitude? What other words are there that mean the same thing as attitudes? Well, there's views, beliefs, perceptions.

 

Now, before I click Search, let's talk about what this means now that we have added a lot more ideas. So this search means that the article needs to have one of these words. It can have more, it has to have at least one. It has to have teachers OR educators OR instructors, etc.

 

AND, it has to have one of these words in the second box. And don't forget, it also has to have standardized testing and case study. Now, we have added more words it has options, so, let's see what this four results turns into we click Search.

 

Okay, great. Increased our results. The reason for that is, because, again, this talks about teacher perceptions, maybe later on in our results list we see an article that talks about instructors or professors.

 

So we have got through step one. Break your topic into keywords. The second one was brainstorm synonyms or topics.

 

The next one, there's two more questions you want to ask yourself. This is getting a little more complicated. Again, the more practice you have searching databases the easier this will become. But again, if you are right here at this point and can replicate this with your own search topic, you are doing really fantastic.

 

The problem with standardized testing is, what if an article talked about standardized tests or standard tests? So those are just different forms of the same word. Typically, our databases will search tests or test, but it's not going to search testing and tests. Typically. I am speaking little bit generalizations here, just so you know.

 

What we are going to do is take off the part of the word that is different among the different ways we can say standardized testing. And we are going to put an asterisk at the end. How I do that is, a push shift on my keyboard and the 8 and that gives us what we call an asterisk. We are going to do that with standard, as well. We are going to take off everything at the end that is going to be different between standards, standardized, and we are going to put an asterisk there.

 

Let's, all other words. These words up here are okay because they are all plural and the database will search singular or plural, typically, if it has just a s.

 

But the problem with case study is of course, plural is -ies. On this we are going to want to use the asterisk again and that will let us search case study or case studies with the -ies. 60 results, let's go ahead and click search.

 

38 results, great, it picked up a few more results that might've used standardized tests or standard tests and case studies in the article.

 

Again, if you refer back to your PowerPoint, there is one more step we need to do or we could do. You might find something for your assignment in the first page or so of results. So you would be doing okay at this point.

 

Another question to ask yourself is, are any of these words that you see in the search boxes, are they phrases? Do you typically see them together with another word back to back, not separated?

 

Well, again, the last two we do, standardized testing is for the most part always going to be stuck together when you see it in the first few results.

 

Then, case studies is the same.

 

So keep them together as a phrase, we are going to put them in quotation marks.

 

Just as an FYI, this also works in Google, so this is a great technique to use in Google and will also help you narrow down those 2 million results.

 

So we have the quotation marks, we are at 38 results. Let's see what happens will we click Search.

 

Great, now we are at 28. A little bit more narrow. It got rid of any articles that might have mentioned case in the title and maybe study somewhere that in another part of the article.

 

I am going to go back to the PowerPoint really quickly. We talked about step one, break down your topic into keywords. Step two, brainstorm synonyms and related concepts. Step three was, does your keyword have more than one form? And here's an example. And step four, is it a word or a phrase? And that's an example, as well.

 

We talked about search box basics and we talked about how AND and OR are used in the database.

 

I mentioned NOT here, but again, we typically don't use that. For right now, I wouldn't even worry about ever including NOT in your search. We can help you out if you get stuck in your search on something like that.

 

Without further ado, I am going to turn this over to Julie, and she is going to talk about a few more ways to develop more keywords and to search the database even more specifically with the additional keywords that you can find. Please, take it away, Julie.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  Thank you, Andrea, can you see my screen? The blue? Okay. Well, that was a great summary of how to combine keywords to develop your search strategy.

 

It can be overwhelming. We understand that. But you are picking up a lot of little skills here that are going to be very useful for you all the way down the line.

 

When we were looking at these hit lists with the subject terms underneath them, that is what I want to talk about next is the subject terms and how to use them to the best effect.

 

So we have this Education Source search here, and if we scroll all the way to the bottom, we can look at some of these other subject headings. So you pick out the articles that are most relevant to whatever it is that you are studying.

 

So look at the subject headings for the articles that are really good. And that may give you some other ideas of terms that you hadn't thought of, whether it be a particular type of learning or teaching or measuring those types of skills. Those can be a great way to find work search terms like "school administrator attitudes" that is not included in some of our other searching there.

 

Note any relevant terms when you come along you might not have thought of, or something that sparks your interest, because you will want to see these notes later, trust me -- especially if you are doing a Masters or a thesis, research dissertation, you might have to redo these searches a couple times, you might want to take notes on what works and doesn't work. Then when you get your Writing Center appointment and asked for that literature search matrix on what you searched, you will be absolutely ready for that.

 

This is one of my favorite ways of discovering the terms is looking at the subject headings of the articles I did find. But some people like to have a little bit more of a structure to their browsing or their searching of terms. And we have thesauri in most of the databases. In ebscohost, you will see the Subject Terms across the top of the window here, and in ProQuest database it's a little farther down, just above the search box.

 

And the thesaurus is just like the old paper thesaurus to give alternate terms for what you are using and to what is the official subject heading, what is the accepted terminology for that particular concept.

 

If I looked for the concept of an eye, I have copied out three different databases here. Medline is a medical database that uses medical subject headings and it is very, very specific to medicine and the affiliated allied health services. If you look at that, under sense organs, the eye is represented under there and then it has several pretty complicated subheadings under it.

 

When I went to Academic Search Complete, which is a very general search database, it just had a couple of eye words here.

 

But when I was in ProQuest Central, I noticed it had things like eye care products to eyeglasses. ProQuest Central is a much more general database that has quite a lot of popular magazines in it, so you will see things like that.

 

But, if, for instance, I have a problem with this Fovea Centralis in my eye, I would kind of like the doctor to be able to search everything on that topic. That is why the medical subject headings are so precise so that the medical care providers can really be thorough in their searches there. And I did find a little bonus, when I went to ProQuest Central earlier today, I was really thrilled to see what I asked for their thesaurus, they asked, "Would you like to use the ProQuest the source or the MeSH 2018?" I was really pleased they gave me the choice of which to use. Anything that is related to the body, medicine or science may be worth looking at MeSH.

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Julie, I was just going to point out as well, if you are bringing up your database, we are still seeing your PowerPoint.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  Right, I didn't think it would be a great use of our time to go in and look at these three databases so I just copied out the subject headings so that you could see them. They are pretty straightforward and actually searching each of these thesauri on their own. It's not that much harder than reading the thesaurus in a book [sounds like].

 

So, we are looking at all of these subject headings and then, what are we going to do with them? That's when we get to the field searching. And there's quite a few fields in the record in these articles. But the most used fields when you are searching field specific are subject and author. And, that comes from the olden days. Anybody remember what these things do? What they used to do? Once upon a time, the library would take each title and categorize it by title, author and subject and give you three access points to that. And that is where the databases are coming with these fields. So you can select a field here and it has author, title, subject, and has a lot more under it. That is in the EBSCO databases.

 

You can see in the ProQuest databases, they are a little bit different. The wording is a little bit different. Sometimes the abbreviations or the scope of what it is they are searching is a little bit different. So that is something to be aware of. They can be different from each other. But they can be figured out if you just kind of look for this SU subject, AU author, and then some of the other ones. I have tried using some of the geographic terms in here. That can be useful. They have "people" in EBSCO. "Person" in ProQuest Central. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. But it's really good to know about the subject and other terms, specifically.

 

Then, we will go over to the browser and we will go back to the library homepage here and, just as an example, I will search Academic Search Complete because it is a nice, general database. I tried to just search with about two dozen different people. There are lots of people in our world that are written about but then also do some writing. That is when you start to use some of these field searching.

 

One of the best examples I could come up with this for myself. If I put in my own name here, I can see that if I don't put it in quotes, we find all sorts of extra people between us. If I put quotes around my name, they gets it a lot closer in here.

 

It will take it down from 160 results where it finds any of those two words, literally, down to 13 results. This first one happens to be a hit, this happens to be something I was interviewed for a long, long time ago when I first started teaching. It was a fun project to do. This is a really, I am not a subject of that particular article, I am a sidebar on it. If you want to wait for it to load, it does have some pictures of me from 16 years ago.

 

Moving back to our hitlist here, this second one has a "James, Julie", but she is the romance writer who came on the screen about 10 years ago. That is not something I wanted to appear in my search. This is where I can say I don't want the word "romance" to appear in my search because I, personally, never wrote any romance novels or something that would have the word romance in it. But we see some other things here like detoxification and mud baths and some Australian things.

 

So it's like, if I am doing research on this researcher and I would like to see things that they have done, then I will go up here and, instead of the NOT romance, I will put in librar* because that will find librarian, library, all sorts of variations on the word library.

 

So we can take those quotes back off....whoa, that's weird. Okay….So we can take the quotes back off, because I wanted to show you they do something a little bit different in this database. We will leave quotes on and see what that comes up with.

 

I see, it is just showing me the history of my results. It is showing, you can see, all the different searches here. I must have clicked on search history. And I wish it would go away now.

 

If we take the quotes off, it will find something different. That is where I start to get really paranoid and I start to take notes. Because I want to know what it is that I did differently. When I come back next week and start doing some more searches, what was it that was different? This first one is not me because it is somebody Julie M, this is the one we just saw, and that one is not me, either. We do get some that are be down further, but my name says "James, Julie." That can be different and different databases will handle it differently. So that is something you need to make a note of, when we put quotes around it as a phrase or whether you let it find the words individually. Does that make sense?

 

You don't want to get too caught up in one way of expressing something. So if we go to author and we list these two words as an author, it comes a little bit closer. You can see, Product Pipeline is one of the review columns I did for several years. These are all mine. I did do some cookbook reviews and some articles about that, too. So this is pretty good. But I feel like I have done more than 45. So let's go to another database, ProQuest Central. If I do the same thing here, you will see, it's hitting a different set of journals but it's also hitting in a different way.

 

ProQuest and EBSCO have different search algorithms that are super secret and they, that's what costs us the big bucks is how these things do their searches.

 

You can see, with just those two search [indiscernible] we now have 52,000 results. And that is just not right. That is way, way more than I should have, because I really didn't publish that much.

 

So we can try putting it in quotes, we can do it this way, can do it that way. But I'm going to take a tip from our last one and say, let's do an author without the quotes around it and see what happens. And with the librar* to indicate my profession. When I looked through those almost every single one of them were mine. There were two or three that were not. But this is a much bigger search set in the last one we had.

 

You really do need to search multiple databases when you want to be thorough. But you need to keep track of which techniques work better in which databases. Because they do work differently and they are all based on different mathematical calculations. If you could do that same search in Google, you will get four bazillion hits, and it's like a taking all three of those card catalog sets and dumping them into a large bin to pull out any instance of those words.

 

That is field searching. There are quite a lot of other fields in there that we looked at. The geographic terms may be useful from time to time. But don't get too caught up in a particular country or a particular city. You may need to look at the region and go a little bit broader than that. But these can be really useful when you want to know exactly what is published on a particular topic. And definitely, not a feature in Google.

 

Here is what we did. We're almost out of time but I just wanted to tell you in summary, we identify keywords in the assignment prompts. We combine keywords to narrow and broaden search results -- with more keywords  to narrow down, and fewer keywords to broaden the search results. Then we identified related keywords using those subject terms --  and thesaurus can help you identify related terms as well, or a broader term if you are not getting enough results. Then we use field searching to search on a specific part of an article. To only find that word in that context which can be really, really helpful.

 

So, coming up in the series, when you have developed a perfect search like that one I did that was almost entirely my articles, I am going to save that search and I'm going to create a search alert. And what it's going to do is send me an email anytime anything with those parameters are published. And to learn that, you can sign up for our Search Alerts webinar on Monday, June 18. Then we will be giving Journals on July 16, we go straight into a Journal and follow the Journals in your particular interest area [sounds like].

 

Did we overload your brain? What questions do you have for us?

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  We will take some questions, we don't have any questions right at the moment. But we're going to go ahead and stop the recording so we can send you the link out for this. Then we will hang around for another five minutes or so to see if we have any questions. So Julie, if you can stop the recording that would be great.

 

Right now, we don't have, we are still waiting for some questions. So we will hang out for a few minutes.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  Okay. Well, you can always review the webinar again. We'll also have the transcript and the PowerPoint on the website here shortly.

 

Do we have a question in there? No?

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Just some technical issues navigating around GoToWebinar.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  Okay. We can also send it to the email if you are not finding it in the GoToWebinar. Some people, if your GoToWebinar panel is minimized, you will see a little orange arrow pointing to the right. Look for that to get your GoToWebinar meeting... It will point to the left when it's hidden.

 

We do have a good question from Mohammed asking, "What do we do if the article is unavailable?"

 

That is for people who are not working on a discussion assignment that needs to be done by midnight tonight. We can get the article for you but it takes seven to 10 days for us to get it from another library.

 

If you go to Services on the library homepage and go to Document Delivery Service, that will tell you how that happens.

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  Just as a reminder, when I showed the original search, just keep in mind that depending on what your assignment is, you probably want to limit a lot of research into full text. So if you went to the very beginning of my search when I was in the landing page for the database, there was a checkbox for full text and a checkbox for peer-reviewed articles. So if you're doing a weekly assignment or discussion that is usually going to work great. Then, as Julie said, if you are a dissertation student or a doctoral student and you need something for longer-term research, we can always get the article for you at another library if we don't have the article. So just keep that in mind depending on your purpose.

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  All right, thanks everyone for coming, and look for an email in the next 24 hours or so to send you the recording.

 

>> ANDREA LEMIEUX:  I think there is one more question, Julie, if you wanted to ....

 

>> JULIE JAMES:  "Is there an easy way to fully check articles without fully opening them?"

 

Yes, you can look at the abstract... You don't have to look at the PDF. You can look at the HTML version which usually opens up much quicker. But the abstract, if you click the title of the article, the abstract will show up and you can see that is worth [indiscernible].

 

Thank you.

 

End Transcript

 

Created June 2018 by Walden University Library