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ENGL 101 - Library Skills Objectives - Maple Woods

Objectives

Students will navigate information systems to access relevant information using knowledge of their organization.

Students will create search strings that retrieve the desired results.

Search Strategies by Search Tool

The library catalog contains records that describe books, ebooks, and audiobooks in our collection. Here's a sample catalog record. When searching the catalog, you're actually searching records rather than the content of the books.

Because catalog records contain limited information (title, sometimes a summary or table of contents), you'll want to keep your searches short to make it more likely the terms you choose will appear in the record. This means choosing keywords: main ideas that sum up the information you're looking for.

Library Catalog Search from MCC-Maple Woods Library on Vimeo.

Search Results in the Library Catalog from MCC-Maple Woods Library on Vimeo.

Database records contain more information than most catalog records, so you can use longer searches known as search statements or search strings.

In some databases, your keywords will be searched against titles, subjects, and abstracts (short summaries of the articles). In other databases, keywords are matched against the full text of the article. Databases that search the full text will give you more results, although they may not be as focused.

  • Databases that search full text: JSTOR, Proquest products
  • Databases that don't default to full text: EBSCO products

To put together a search statement, you'll need to be familiar with Boolean operators. Watch the video below to learn how they work:

Once you're familiar with Boolean operators, you can use them to create your search statement. Watch the following video to walk through how to put one together:

You don't need search strings to use search engines like Google, but tools like Boolean operators and phrase searching do still work.

Here are some other tricks when using Google:

  • Typing site:.edu (keywords) will only give you results from .edu domains. You can do this for any domain type.
    • .com = commercial. That doesn't mean all .coms are bad. Most news sites are .coms.
    • .net = originally meant for telecommunications, now similar to .com
    • .org = organization. Just because a site belongs to an organization does not mean that organization is reliable.
    • .edu = educational. .edu pages may be created by an institutional group or an individual student or employee.
    • .gov = government.
  • Typing 2012..2013 or another date range will search for results in that time period.
  • Scholar.google.com will give you more academic results like scholarly journal articles and dissertations.

Two Google search results for air purifiers. The first has the bolded word 'Ad' next to its url.

When using search engines, watch out for results labeled 'sponsored' or 'ad'. The creators of these sites paid for them to appear at the top of your search results. They may not actually be the best match.

Determining whether a website will meet your needs depends on what your needs are - a website appropriate for answering a simple factual question may not be appropriate for citing in an academic paper. Questions to ask yourself when looking at any website are:

  • Who is giving me this information? Look up the author or publisher. Do they know what they're talking about? Do they have a bias or agenda, and how might that impact the information they share with you? For example, a car manufacturer probably knows a lot about the car they're selling you, but they might not tell you any of its drawbacks. 
  • Is the information current? Does that matter for your topic?
  • Where did the site get its information? If it links back to a source, click the links. Are those sources reliable? Are they being represented accurately? For example, news articles sometimes exaggerate or misinterpret the scientific studies they're reporting on.