Topic-3: Search tools & Search strategies

Salaaaaaaaaaaam

This topic was very helpful and useful to me. The aim of this topic is to know appropriate tools and search strategies to find information. In the first session of this topic, I learnt that search tools mean Utilities available on the Internet to help user find information among the millions of documents. I also learnt that search tools are categorized into three types which are Library Catalogue, Internet Directories, Search Engines, and Database. Moreover, I learnt that search tools find information in different ways. 

The first category of search tools that I learnt is library catalogue. Library catalog is a systematic listing of the books and materials in a library with descriptive information of the materials. Therefore, I learnt that libraries organize and record their materials through library catalogues. The traditional way of finding resources in the library was a card or a book catalogue. Information on the traditional catalog record included the call numbers, author, title, edition, publisher and brief description of the item. However, the modern libraries use Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). OPAC provides us with details about the books, audiovisuals, and other materials that can be found in library. Understand the OPAC can help us to locate the materials in the library easily. OPAC contains a record for each book, audiovisual and periodical and other collection. The catalogs of other libraries contain the same types of information about items in their collections.

After that, I learnt about the OPAC in my university (AiU). AiU OPAC contains over 167,000 bibliographic records among with various formats. The AiU OPAC is provided by Virginia Tech Library Systems (VTLS). VTLS is a leading global company providing library automation software and services mostly to government and university customers. VTLS integrates with many of the most popular specialized library software and content solutions such as Syndetics content enrichment, OverDrive e-books, Comprise PC reservation and print management, iTiva automated telephone notification, and Virtua which is a full-function library management system, providing management of circulation, cataloging, serials, acquisitions, course reserves and more. All these are fully functioning and allow librarians to access any function at any time according to their library-assigned permissions. The AiU OPAC is called CHAMO which is one of the new features provided by VTLS. CHAMO lets users create personal lists, tag, enter comments or reviews and link to social sites like Facebook and PC or mobile device. It encourages users to interact with the library and with each other by allowing them to share what they have found on Facebook, Twitter and many other social media sites. It also extends the reach and support a wide variety of mobile devices access. In addition to that, AiU OPAC has two criteria to search which are general and advance search. A general search will return results based on a search for the word that you entered in the Author, Title, or Subjects fields. However, the advance search can be used to provide a great degree of specificity by to select and search a category such as any Field, Author, Title, Subject, ISBN, ISSN, LCCN, UPC and Control Number. 

The second category of search tools is internet. The internet is a global system interconnected networks that uses the standard internet protocol to serve billions of user. In fact, the most common strategies to find information on the Web are Search Engines and Subject Directories. Internet search engines are special tools on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. They are large databases that help user to any interest sites. Serach engines are either individual search engines such as Google or Metasearch engines such as dogpile. On the other hand, Subject directories in general are smaller and selective than search engines. They use categories to focus the search, and their sites are arranged by categories, not just by keywords. Furthermore, subject directories are organized by humans.

The third category of search tools is online database. Online databases are collections of computerized information or data such as articles, books, graphics and multimedia that can be searched to find information. Online databases provide access to resources across a wide range of topic and subject areas such as the arts and genealogy. AiU use 24x7 and Ebray which are types of online databases. Moreover, online databases can provide access to the entire article or summary of the article. Database content may often be searched by: Keywords, Title, Author, or Subject. It also provides citation such as title, author, publisher, and place of publication.   

In the second session of this topic, I learnt basics about search strategies. First I learnt that search strategy is the approach and structured or organization of terms used to search a database or internet. These strategies can help the user find accurate results and specific information. In this lesson, I learnt how to use four strategies to find the information. The first strategy is searching with keyword by use synonyms of the keyword in searching and also combines keywords and synonym together. For example, if you want to search about Information Literacy you can use the synonyms of it such as information skills. 

 The second strategy is Boolean Searching. This strategy is to limit, broaden, or define the search by using Boolean operators which are: And (to limit the search), OR (to broad the search), and Not (to exclude unwanted terms).

The third strategy is Truncation and Wildcards. Truncation and wildcards broaden your search capabilities by allowing you to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word or word stem, such as singular and plural forms. Moreover, A wildcard AND Truncation is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. The use of Truncation is to expand the search to locate all words beginning with the same root. However, A Wildcard is used in the middle of a word to match with the term. 

The fourth strategy is Phrase Searching which means searching for two or more words as an exact phrase. To use this strategy you need use brackets ( ) or inverted commas “ “. At the end this topic, I hope that this information can help you as it help me a lot.

Thanks