FCC133 Information Literacy

Search Strategies Basics

When to use keywords, subject headings, phrases, single words?

This week's lesson was on the topic of how to search for information using basic strategies, like which terms to be used in order to get the broader result. Usually keywords are widely used when searching or brainstorming on some concerned topic. There is also the Subject headings which uses a standardized vocabulary, usually giving you more specific resources on your topic. Some examples are Library Subject headings, Science subject headings, Thesaurus of psychological index terms, etc.

Boolean Searching

Boolean operator or keywords

This searching allows you to group words together in a database or environment such as the World Wide Web to receive a number of different results. The results widely varies depending on the way  you group words. It is a common search strategy.

Boolean operators are words that connect a search that may add or subtract a concept to your search. It allows OR to expand or AND to limit our search. Most of the search engines allow the use of some Boolean searching.

Boolean queries- AND

It allows grouping of words for variety of results. For example, the query 'Beach AND California' produces results containing both words.

Image 1

Boolean queries- OR

Using OR will broaden the search. The query 'Beach OR California' will yield results containing either the word beach or California. Image 2

Boolean queries- NOT

NOT helps exclude words from the search. If a result has the word that you would like to search but it also contains another word you want to exclude, then it will not show that result. Image 3

Search Strategies Basics

Truncations and Wildcard

This week was spent on learning the usage of truncation and wildcard. These two help to broaden our search capabilities by allowing us to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word, such as singular and plural forms.

Truncation: Using a wildcard at the end of a word to search for multiple results.  It expands the search to locate all words beginning with the same root. Example: Teen* will give teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.

Wildcard:  A wildcard is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. It usually represents a single character. Example: wom?n will give woman, women, etc.

Phrase Searching

This type of search is used with a string of words (instead of a single word) to search with. It will yield fewer results. When looking for information on Information Literacy the result of the search will yield many irrelevant documents since each of the words has its own meaning. But it has whole different meaning when put together so to be precise we either use "  " or (  ). Example: (Information Literacy).

Its use has been proven to be very effective and time-saving. This subject is certainly a must for the people of the information age. This is all for this week!