Competency 5

This competency asked SLIS students to perform four database searches using various search strategies.

Search 1: Building Block Search ASC
Question: How Can School Librarians Help Students Becomes Successful Online Searchers?"
I then broke my query into three parts:
s1=online searching
s2=students
s3= school librarian

When I first connect the words with the Boolean operator AND I received 17 hits.
The sixth result, "Help Them Get IT: Infusing Technology in Instruction" by Janet Murray, is relevant to my topic. This type of technique forces me to break down my question into relevant parts and to consider possibly synonyms for words that I am searching for that might be more categorized as keywords in an existing document.

Search 2: Successive Fraction Search within Library Lit
A Successive Fraction strategy is useful for someone is unfamiliar with a topic.

I will begin with my broadest term first and note the results. I will then search my other two terms, noting their results. "Online Searching" resulted in 3,560 hits, "students" resulted in 11,896 hits, while 7,878 hits. I then searched using "online searching" and added "students" which resulted in 212 hits which is still quite a bit so I added school librarian to the search query. this search yielded 12 hits. The article "Return of the Google Game" by Katrine Watkins is a relevant article and the abstract states: "The writer presents an updated version of the Google Game, which aims to teach teens the fundamentals of efficient searching. This version is intended to help librarians develop students' skills as online researchers and enable them to produce fewer and better hits." Great!

Search 3: Citation Pearl on ERIC

First, I search for "school librarian" and "online searching." The article titled "Brave the Wave: Using the Internet for Student Research" by Elizabeth Saliba and Kellie Shoemaker is a relevant article "my pearl." I looked at the descriptors assigned to the article. This included: Academic Libraries, Bibliographies, Elementary Secondary Education, Information Seeking, Information Sources, Internet, Librarians, Online Searching, Public Libraries, School Libraries, Student Research, Teachers, Two Year Colleges, User Needs (Information), Elementary Secondary Education, Two Year Colleges. I decide to use the descriptor "student research" to help in my search. This search yeilded 3062 hits, so I need to narrow it. I add "online" to my search. Now my results are 771, which is still too broad. I will add "librarian" to the search query. The search yeilds 41 records. The first hit is, "Developing Powerful Student Researchers: by Nancy Messmer. I like this article as it deals with librarians collaborating with teachers within district to produce powerful searchers of students. This search strategy was good and helped if I was lacking the right keyword to implement in my search as it pertains to various databases indexing systems.

Search 4: Specific Facet search on WorldCat
The Specific Facet search is nearly the opposite of the Successive Fractions search. This time I will start my search with my query that is to result in the least likely amount of hit. I decided on "school librarian." This resulted in 4053 hits. I then searched for "online searching" and received 7734 hits and "students" yield 1,007,005 hits!

So I begin with "school librarian" and add "online searching" to narrow the results. I received 11 hits from that search. Once I add "students" to the query my results are now yielding 4 hits. All of the hits were in the area of college students so I add "junior high" to my student query and came back with 2 hits. These still applied to college level students or a conference about higher education.
I'm sure this is a great strategy for searching however, in my case, I am obviously in need of selecting "more relevant" keywords to depict my topic. The citation pearl was helpful in this regard which I thought brought about the best result.