Research-Class

Part one:

This topic focuses on questions regarding how to use Boolean operators in keyword searches. In addition to the description of Boolean operators in the Commentary of the first week, there are also a few web tutorials in Webliography. Visit these websites to strengthen your understanding of how to use the operators.

Boolean Operators AND, OR, NOT (or AND NOT in some databases), which are also called Boolean Logic or simply Operators, were named after George Boole, a British mathematician who lived in 1800s. He used these operators as a part of a system of logic. Actually we may have been using these words all the time in our daily searches for information without knowing that they have a special name. Read Module 1 and the web tutorials carefully and do some searches of your own in UMUC library catalog and databases. You can find that using Boolean Operators correctly or incorrectly can make a big difference in your search results.

Boolean Operators are mostly used in database searches. Some search engines such as Google may have different rules. For example, in Google we don’t have to use AND because all the words we type in are automatically connected with AND. We can use “or,” though, but it must be capitalized “OR.” We do not use NOT but the symbol “-” to exclude certain terms. More Google search features can be found on Google Search Basics page (http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861).

Part two:

When a book or an article is published, it is given one or several subject headings according to the subject areas it covers. Subject headings are official subject terms given by an authoritative institute, publisher, or agency such as Library of Congress. Subject terms are not necessarily the same as the keywords we use in our search. Usually in a catalog or database record, we can find a list of subject headings assigned to a book or an article. Sometimes subject headings given to a work are very different from the title of the work. For example, an article’s title may contain a phrase “baby blues,” but the subject heading given to the article may be “Postpartum Depression.”

Subject search is a focused search if we happen to know the subject heading, because it ensures that the retrieved sources deal with the subject of our topic. It is just like searching a Yellow Page, where we can find all moving companies’ information under the subject term “Moving.”

What if we don’t know the subject heading of our research topic? We can simply start with a Keyword search by selecting a few terms that can best address the main points of our topic. When we see a list of sources retrieved by a keyword search, we can select a relevant record, and open it to see what subject headings are assigned to the source. Then we can use the subject headings of that source to do further searches. In most catalog/database records, we can simply click the link of a subject heading to see a list of works focusing on the subject.

**Both of these are discussion board post; only need about a paragraph or two at most**

 

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