6a: Building Block Search

Database: ERIC/EBSCO Host

First, I organized my search terms into three sets:

Set 1: school librar* OR school librar* media center OR secondary libr*
Set 2: curriculum OR instruction OR instruct* planning
Set 3: school librar* OR school librar* media center OR secondary libr* AND curriculum OR instruct* OR instruct* planning

Set 3 is obviously the full "search string" combining Sets 1 & 2. I chose to do this for reasons that should become clear later.

On the ERIC search page, I entered each set into a row and did not try to limit the search at all to subject descriptors, abstracts or titles.

Without any type of search limiters, 2512 results appeared. As I became more adept (or experimental) at searching this way, I decided to apply the following search limiters in an effort to narrow my list of results. I chose not to use "All Text" because that would have given me journal titles in addition to every other appearance of my search terms. I did, however, ask ERIC to sort by relevance as an additional limiter.

Search Limiters:
Subject Descriptors (Sets 1 & 2): 1289 results
Abstracts (Sets 1 & 2): 811
Title (Sets 1 & 2): 51 (becoming more manageable)
Title (Sets 1 & 2) & Abstract (Set 3): 39 (definitely manageable)

The article I retrieved, "Resource Alignment: Providing Curriculum Support in the School Library Media Center" by Karen Lowe, was published in 2001. Its abstract envisions the school librarian as a manager of a library closely tied to instruction.

Reflection on the Building Block: The search was surprisingly easy once the search terms were nailed down. Since I had never truncated before, I was not sure how it would work, but it worked well. Further limiting by date and article type (peer-reviewed, for example, or available as a .pdf file) could have narrowed the list of results even further. Using Row 3 allowed me to fiddle around with the search limiters. Most of the received results in the last group were fairly useful, or they looked that way. Interestingly, one of the results was an article comparing a purely online with a hybrid online/face-to-face delivery method in two LIS programs. This was an indication that perhaps I should have used the Boolean operator NOT. Still, though, the Building Block search combined with search limiters was very effective.