Seek and Ye Shall Find... and Find... and Find...

Today a wealth of information is stored electronically, and is just waiting to be accessed. With a few keystrokes, one can search a database and retrieve thousands of hits on any given topic. Finding information is easy ... finding useful information that pertains to a specific area of interest can be more tricky though. For a librarian, being familiar with the different types of searches possible is crucial for helping patrons obtain the search results they need quickly and accurately.

This week in my librarianship class, we have been learning more about four types of searches commonly performed in databases. They are:

• Building Block Search
• Citation Pearl Growing Search
• Specific Facet First Search
• Successive Fractions Search

So this week's blog will be spent going over what each type of search is, how to perform each search, and what kind of results each search produces. For a little variety, I plan on performing each type of search in a different database.


1. Building Block

The Building Block search is useful because it has you identify the most important components, or facets, of your search topic and then search by the terms for each facet. These terms are joined by Boolean operators (and, or, not) when searching. My topic for this blog is "Approaches libraries take to organize information digitally". First, I break down this topic into three primary facets: digitization, organizing, and approaches. Then I designate search terms for those three facets:

S1 = digitization or digital or digitizing
S2 = organizing or arranging or planning
S3 = approaches or methods or strategies

I will join the searches with the Boolean operator "and" so that S1 and S2 and S3 become my total search. I decided to use the JStor database for this search:

(click any picture to enlarge)

This search yielded 11,602 hits. The results for this search appear like this:

2. Specific Facet First

The purpose of performing a Specific Facet First search is to determine which facet of your search is likely to produce the fewest results and then search for it to determine if it is too limiting. If this search doesn't return very many hits, say less than 30-35, it's probably not a very good topic for me to explore.

Because digitization is the most specific facet of the three I had when I did my Boolean search, I feel this facet should be used for my Specific Facet First search, which I decided to perform in the Project Muse database (which is a great database to use if you just want to browse journals, by the way). This search received 451 hits.




Project Muse displays retrieved items as follows:


3. Citation Pearl Growing

The third search method is Citation Pearl Growing, which is also known as "snowballing". For this type of search, you use known items or previous search results to obtain additional terms with which to search. My Specific Facet First search using only digitization was a little too precise, so I decided to pull the terms "project" and "preservation " out of that search to perform additional searches. I added these terms using the Boolean "or" function, and I performed the search in the WorldCat database.



This type of search can really expand the number of hits received. This particular search yielded 210,805 results:




4. Successive Fractions

The last search method, the Successive Fractions search, requires using the broadest facet first, then narrow by adding a second and third facet. In some ways, it's an opposite approach from doing a Building Block search.

Looking at the results from my Citation Pearl Growing search, I realize I have too many results, and not all of them relate to my specific topic. I look through my results, and decide to narrow my search by adding the limiting date range of 2005 to 2009 and to only retrieve full text articles. I used the LibLit database for this search:




This search produced 261 results:




Before taking this class, I never knew there were so many different ways to search! The only method I was familiar with was walking the stacks of my local library, which is known as browsing, and performing Google searches. It's now possible to browse in the virtual world, though I find that performing these types of searches and others in various databases procure for me the information I want much more quickly. What I found most remarkable is that so many results can be found that many methods have been devised for reducing search results, from applying limiters, using the Boolean "not" function, and performing searches like the Successive Factions search. The more I learn, the more I want to know... and now, I know how to find it.