Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/-uigd8-2GC4

 

Begin Transcript

 

Narration:

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  Thank you for coming out tonight.  We are going to get started in a minute but I just wanted to check my audio.  If you can hear me just say, hi, in the questions box.  Thank you.  We will get started in one minute.

 

It is 8:30 PM, I'm going to jump in here and welcome all of you to our webinar.  Before we get started want to go over a little housekeeping.  This is the GoTo Webinar toolbox.  If you do not see the full toolbox set up and only see the little arrow, you can click on that arrow and it will expand to show the full toolbox.  The handouts -- the slide deck is in the handouts section.  We have a box for questions.  Please feel free to ask questions. please keep questions on topic.  This session is going to be closed-captioned and the transcription link is in the chat box and in the handout.  So if you download the slide deck it will be in there.

 

Finally, we are going to be recording the session and all of you will be receiving a copy that recording and one-two days, and that will come directly from GoTo Webinar.

 

I will go ahead and hit the, record, button.  And welcome everybody to the mysteries of the library revealed: Boolean operators.  Want to say hi to everyone and we will turn off our, so they do not interfere with the rest of the session.

 

My name is Kim Burton, I am one of the liaisons to the college of education and with me is Anne Rojas, who is the other  liaison to the college of education, and tonight we will be talking about Boolean operators.

 

Before we talk about that, I want to go over what the mysteries of the library revealed webinar series is.  It is a webinar series we present every month, it is usually the third month of the holiday, I am sorry, third Monday the month. Our next webinar coming up will be Mysteries of the Library Revealed: Organization and Storage.  In March.  In April we are doing mysteries of the library revealed: scholar works.  For those of you who do not know SholarWorks, this is the Walden institutional repository with a lot of great things in it.  I recommend you plan to come to that one or the one in March.  If you cannot make it to either of these two days, you can always register, anybody who registers for the webinar will receive a recording of that webinar in one or two days regardless of whether you attended.

 

With that being said, I'm going to turn it over to Anne.

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  Thank you very much brick everybody wonders what our bullying operators. Boole was a genius mathematician and there are three operators, and, or, not.  All bullion operators work on the same principle.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  What about if you are searching online somewhere else, could you use these there?

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  Yes, everywhere.  Amazon, Netflix, all databases work on these principles.  That is why he was a genius because these still apply two centuries later Pickett is like he knew what was coming.

 

Reason they are important of the libraries because you have to explicitly tell the database how you are using them, as opposed to like in Google, where they are pretty much assumed.  That is the biggest difference between our Google style search box on the homepage and how you search in Google itself.

 

Databases work like Google but not exactly like Google.  So in order to use that and do precision searches and get accurate results, you want to put your search together with "end-, or and not".  Let's look at them in action at the library homepage.

 

If you want to push that over to me I can present.  Or you can do it.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  I'm going to make you presenter.

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  Great.  If I want to use this main search box on the library homepage and I put in my search query, want to know how larger use increases student success in college.  And I put that in and I click on, search.  I am going to be probably very disappointed because -- hopefully it will give us something -- basically, because I am not telling it exactly how to search, I am just giving it a full sentence, and it does not know how to read it.

 

You can see here it says there were no results return for your search.  And it does have a link to help you with database search techniques, if you want to click onto that.

 

The reason I want to tell you about this is because a lot of people get frustrated and put their search in like this and they don't get results and then they leave the library because it is not working for them.  But you only have to put in a little effort to get some good results.

 

If I put in "library and academic success and college", to look and see what kind of research I can find  or what kind of articles I can find that consider all of those topics together, you can see I get 1200 results.  Way better results, and like I said, it just takes a couple of seconds to put it together so you get results.  You can see here, you have Find@Walden buttons, peer review, all those things based on your assignment requirements.

 

To look in more detail, I will go back into the PowerPoint here.  It is showing it on the wrong screen for me so I am going to move that over here and show you my Venn diagram how it works.  Now it is showing it still on the other screen .  So if we are looking research on people who are watching game of thrones, and Blackish, even though it is counterintuitive, we will get just a limited number of results, the little bit of overlap of those two, when I use, and.  So AND will give me fewer results.  With OR, and I say I want to do research on people who watch Game of Thrones or Blackish brick then it will give me everybody in both circles. NOT, you are inevitably going to miss out on what you are interested in.  So if I'm looking at people who watch Blackish but not Game of Thrones, I will miss that little chunk of overlap because it will take out the people who watch both.  So I'm going to get like a cookie shaped results list and miss a few people who do watch Blackish.so we use NOT only in specific circumstances.

 

Let's look at one example of how OR works.  If I look at people who watch any of these three dramas, the Americans, Game of Thrones or This Is Us, I would get everybody in the three circles.  I could put those together and look at people who watch Game of Thrones or Americans or this is Us or Blackish or Brooklyn Or Great News, it gives me this overlap.  That is a great way to look at it in the then diagrams. and Kim can show us how this applies to working in databases.

 

>>   KIM BURTON: Now we'll learn how Boolean operators work, we need to see how we can use them in different databases. A database, a library database is a searchable digital collection of different types of materials, such as books, journals my magazines, newspapers, dissertations, etc.  Walden library has paid subscriptions to over 100 library databases.

 

These databases are available to us through several different providers. they have their own interfaces for their databases.  Although they may not look the same, they all share the same functionality or mostly the same functionality work they are all built to use Boolean operators to provide efficient, highly complex searches, to find relevant and focused results.  Boolean operators are the key to using these databases.

 

I have an example of two databases that we have here.  These two databases actually are already set up with the AND Boolean operator in front of the search box.  So the first one is, the databases academic search complete and it is provided to us by EBSCO.  You can see the AND is set up in each search box.  So if I break up my topic into topics.  For teenage drug abuse areas.  My concepts would be teenagers, drug abuse and rural.  I want to put each of those topics into each box.  Teenager and drug abuse and rural.

 

You can see it is set up the same and it has the same functionality.  Teenager and drug abuse and rural, if you click on this down are you can change the bullying operator but we recommend you do not do that. Leave it as AND and then you can add the OR operator in the search box itself.  We will get to that later.

 

Now I want to go out and go into one of our databases and show you how this works.  I'm going to go to the library website.  And I'm going to go into databases A-Z, and select "academic search complete".  This is a database that we get through EBSCO.

 

Here it is.  And it will probably look familiar to you.  Many of you have used these EBSCO databases.  But it says here, this is the name of the database.  Let's use the example I was just sing. my topic is about teenagers and drug abuse and rural areas.

 

So I don't get a thousand results, I'm going to put a few limiters on here.  I only want articles from 2006 from peer reviewed scholarly journals.  So when I hit results I get eight results.  But I'm thinking this is a topic that should have a few more results.

 

There should be a few more articles out there on this.  So I want to find additional terms to add to this search break and I will use the Boolean operator OR to expand it. I will look in the title of the article, I want to look in the subject terms.  These are basically tags that the databases have assigned two articles in the database.  They are saying this article is about teenagers and substance abuse, about parent and teenager -- Two things I see right off is first of all adolescents.  That's another term for teenagers so I went to add that.  And I will use the OR so now I want articles that are about teenagers or adolescents, but then they also have to have drug abuse and rural.

 

I have substance use in here so I could use that.  I also want to expand my search to not only include drug abuse, but also alcohol abuse.  So I'm going to add all of those.  Drug abuse or substance abuse or alcohol abuse.  I can add as many search terms as I want in this box as long as all of the search terms are alternative keywords for each other or synonyms.

 

Then I can brainstorm.  I know sometimes it rural can also be used as remote.  Now, I'm going to hit, search. And I added these additional terms with OR I should get more results back and I do.  I get 56 results back. I will look for additional terms to add, if I click on the title of the article it will bring me to a detailed record.  Here, I can go down and read the abstract to see if there's anything else in here I may to add to my search.

 

One thing I can do here is something called truncation.  Truncation is when you can take a root word and tell the database just to search for this root word.  Here we have, teenagers.  I can take this and change it to teen*, that is the shift-8 key, the star key. It's also going to look for teenager or anything that starts with teen-. I can do the same thing with adolescents.  I can look for adolescence and adolescent, by typing "adoles*"

 

I also want to jump in and show you this in ProQuest central pit but before I do this, want to mention that -- have to thank Anne, because we were planning this webinar I mentioned I did not like the NOT bullying operator because it eliminates relevant results.  I was thinking about not bringing it up here. But the perfect example of when you really should use NOT and it will be pretty beneficial -- I will go to databases and now we will go to ProQuest  Central--

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  A good question came to because we are always capitalizing the words is AND OR and NOT... to answer that it is a good idea to get in the habit of capitalizing them because some databases require it.  Not all but some.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  So you might as well just get used to doing it now. Let’s say you want to do research on Apple crops and the sustainability.

 

And ProQuest I will type in, Apple.  Here, I will type in, sustainability. and I will limit this to the last three months.  Then I will hit, search.

 

We have Apple AND sustainability.  So everything will have both of those things in it.

 

So I get back these results, over 1000 results.  But when I go through here, look what I see. Iphone. I don't want anything to do with Apple Computer.  I just want to know about Apple crops.  So I will go back to "modify search".  And I'm going to add a row, and change this to the NOT.

 

I am telling it that I want it to have apple in it and sustainability but it cannot have computer, it cannot have iPhone  or iPad or mobile device or phone, so now I'm going to hit, search. And it narrows it down and it takes out the iPhone from there.

 

Another thing I could do here is get rid of the ability just to sustain with an asterisk, and now it will search for apple AND sustainability AND sustain, but not all these terms.  So when I hit, search, this will expand it out a little bit more.

 

That gives you an idea of how you can use the Boolean operators to get this really complex searches and get relevant results.  We do have a couple of other databases I wanted to show you here.  Some of the library databases start off with the assumption that the researcher is aware of how Boolean operators work and expect you to use them in their searches.  They are not set up like the EBSCO or ProQuest databases.

 

In here, they want you to use -- it just as a plain line this one for Science Director can hear, it just says where you are supposed to be searching.

 

Want to point out that these databases have links if you get stuck.  So if you are in SAGE and they don't have those bullying operators there, you can go over here and click on this and you will find more information about using Boolean operators, and it will put the AND in between them.

 

So I will jump into SAGE.

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS: ScienceDirect is like Google.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  So it would search for teenagers and drug and abuse and rural. I want to put that into quotation so it searches those two, not drug AND abuse but drug abuse together.  Because then it would bring in violence and domestic violence and things like that.

 

SAGE Journals puts the AND automatically in between everything.  I want to do a search for teenager, here, drug abuse.  I want to put drug abuse" because I want "drug abuse" as a term.  The quotations tell the database that those two words need to be together.  Here I will hit rural, and go ahead and hit, search.

 

And I got 553 results.  So I can refine the search by adding in it teen* OR adolescen*. And now it should bring back more results.  Over 2000 results are showing now.

 

All these Boolean operators all work in the databases.  They are the key forgetting you those good results.

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  Kim, have you ever come up to a maximum number in search box?  I've never come to a maximum.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  No I have not.  The only place I have come to a maximum with an OR was in Google Scholar. I'll have to go back and check on that and see exactly how long it does let you get in there.  But that's another limit that we have two Google Scholar.

 

This slide has links to some references that we have for you. The first one is the "Quick answer" what are bullying operators?   It gives you a quick answer to what they are and links to other content that we have in the library.  library guide connects keywords with Boolean operators.  And we also have a short video, Boolean operators and truncation.  This one is very short and talks about in a very broad sense what we have been talking about tonight.

 

If you have any questions, please feel free to write them in the question box right now.  I want to show you a few other things that we have in the library to get answers to your questions.

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  Somebody did have a question asking if there's a number of search results that you should try to obtain.  Really, the answer is always "it depends".  The important thing is to get results for whatever project you are working on.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  And sometimes you can get results, like the results in SAGE, that is a lot.  I would want to narrow that down.  I'm not going to be able to read 2400 articles for a weekly assignment.  So here, I would add maybe another search term to it or somehow try to narrow it down a little so I do not have so many.  Such as limiting it to a research article like we have on the right.

 

I want to point out where you can go to get answers to your questions.  On the banner at the top of every webpage in the library you can click on "ask a librarian".  Here you can email us.  We answer email seven days a week.  Not 24 hours but usually we have a pretty good turnaround.  We do have a chat.  When you go into chat, today's date would be highlighted with the hours in Eastern time that the chat is open.  The chat is actually open right now.

 

You can call us and leave a voicemail message and we will return that voice mail message by email, hopefully answering your question break but you can also make a doctoral researcher appointment if you are at the doctoral level with your college liaison from your program.  On the left-hand side is a frequently asked questions quick answer.  If you have a question you can go over here and type in Boolean, hit return, and it will bring in a bunch of links about Boolean operators picks you can click on that and it will walk you through the steps of what we were just talking about.

 

Finally, we do have, under the "get help" in the library and "recorded webinars" under local library skills" we have all of the recorded webinars for the Mystery for the Library Revealed Series.  These are 30 minute webinars on a specific topic on the library.  We go over them, short and brief, just to give you generally idea but hopefully give you enough information that you can go in and start using those resources.  And if you do have further questions, we hope we've been able to point you in the right direction where you can get answers to those questions, specifically "ask a librarian" or "quick answers".  Here is a list of all the different ones we have so far.

 

  At the end of this webinar, you will have a survey, so if there is a webinar that you do not see here or there is a topic you would like to learn more about in the library, please give us a suggestion, we are always looking for suggestions on what we should be presenting for you guys.  Does anybody have any other questions?

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  I think we have everything else taken care of.  There was a question about dissertations, the dissertations database use the ProQuest interface.  So looks like the second example Kim used, yes, so the Boolean is everywhere.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  Yes, we can use it everywhere. Dissertations and theses is provided to us by ProQuest, so it is set up exactly as we were in this ProQuest Central.

 

We can give you back two minutes of your time tonight.  Thank you everybody for joining us.  And please register for next month's webinar if you have a chance.  Or watch some of these recorded ones.

 

>>    ANNE ROJAS:  Do not be shy, ask questions as they arise.

 

>>   KIM BURTON:  Absolutely.  I will end the recording.  And stop the webinar.  Thanks everybody.  Bye-bye.

 

 

End Transcript

 

Created February 2019 by Walden University Library