Saturday, February 28, 2009

6: Database Searching

Since my interest area is on involving the school library (and librarian) more closely in teaching and learning, my overall Search Problem can be expressed as follows:

  • School Library Involvement in Curriculum and Instruction

Component Facets:

  • School Library
  • Curriculum and Instruction

Terms for Each Facet:

  • School library, K-12 library, school library media center, elementary, middle school and secondary school library
  • Curriculum, instruction, instructional planning

The first thing I did was to eliminate "k-12 library" and reduce "elementary, middle school and secondary school library" from my terms above in order to eliminate elementary school libraries from consideration. I then added "secondary library" to the terms.

Next, since I wanted my terms to cover "librarians" in addition to "library" and "libraries," I truncated that term as "librar*". Similarly, I did the same for "instruction," turning it into "instruct*". To these, I added the Boolean operators AND and OR.

My search terms thus became: school libr* OR school libr* media center OR secondary school libr* AND curriculum OR instruction OR instruct* planning

At this point, I was ready to use the following search strategies: Building Block, Specific Facet First, Successive Fractions and Citation Pearl.

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