6d: Citation Pearl

Results after searching for the new text...

Descriptors for the new text...

Text found after following descriptors in Citation Pearl...

Database: WorldCat

First, I went to Amazon.com and checked a text I’d cited in Competency 5: Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning published by the American Association of School Librarians. While there, I noticed that others had bought Assessing Learning: Librarians and Teachers as Partners (2005), by Violet Harada and Joan Yoshina. Since I did not want to use the same book for this competency that I had used before and because the word “partners” appeared in the title, this book fit well.

Then, I went to WorldCat and searched for the new text. One of the index terms on the record was "school librarian participation in curriculum planning," exactly the subject heading for which I’d been searching. (School librarian participation in instruction is, after all, the purpose of this Blog.) With this term, I did two things. First, I clicked on it and received 41 results. Second, I broke it down into two component pieces “school librarian” and “curriculum planning,” which returned 127 results.

On the first page of each set of results (after sorting by date) was a book entitled The Collaboration Handbook by Toni Buzzeo, published by Linworth in 2008. Again, as with the other book, the word “collaboration” appears in the title and “professional relationships” is an additional index term. “Group work in education” is also an index term.

Reflection on the Citation Pearl: Of the four searches, this was perhaps the easiest, primarily because it began with a known entity. When searching, knowing whether a database contains a specific item emerges more quickly than undertaking a blind search. If WorldCat did not have that book, I could have continued entering titles until one was returned. Using the index terms to create new search terms required very little time as well, especially after doing it for the other searches. The link on the index terms discussed previously also simplified the retrieval process. “School librarian participation in curriculum planning” was specific and retrieved generally strong and useful results.