Search Tools Lesson Plan

Search Tools Lesson Plan

Instructions in bold face are actions that the instructor should take during the class.

Instructions in italics are notes to the instructor.

Please note that in our practice sessions, the students told us repeatedly that they enjoyed learning about the MySearchTools section and that they would not have used this tool on their own so it’s strongly recommended that you include at least a mention of this function.

Please feel free to use whatever sections of this lesson plan you feel would be most appropriate for the group you are teaching.

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Preparations before the class

If, in Section VI, part C, you plan to run a search on Down Syndrome in Genetics Abstracts, then choose an entry ahead of time, that will easily pull up the full text of an article through MGetIt.

In preparation for Section IX, run a Quick Search of athletes and body image in the General Interest databases. Either find the entry that begins “Disordered eating attitudes and…” or find another entry from a scholarly journal that is easily available full text through MGetIt but is not available full text in Search Tools. If you choose another entry, then amend the script accordingly based on how much information appears initially in Search Tools.

In Section IX, part F, check the Summary of your search to make sure the results still give approximately the same numbers.

In Section IX, parts H and I, if you want to emphasize a subset other than the Social Sciences, prepare an appropriate example ahead of time.

Have the citation you’re using in Find EJournals written out on the board beforehand.

Lawrence, A. (2006) “Legacy of a Longhorns Legend.” Sports Illustrated, January 7th, 2006, p. 79.

OR

Taylor, P. (2005) “Big Ten Takes a Hit.” Sports Illustrated, September 19, 2005, p. 112.

Have the PowerPoint presentation open in one window but not the one that students will see..

Have Search Tools window open to begin with, so that students do not think the PPT slide is what ST looks like.

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I. Introduction: What is SearchTools?

·  Gateway to the library’s electronic resources.

·  Visual map of the different things that Search Tools allows you to do.

[Now open up PPT slide]

·  Variety of tools that allow you to perform different functions that may not be directly related to each other, but are all related to finding electronic resources.

·  The different functions are the Quick/Power Search, Find e-Journals, and Find Databases.

A. Find e-Journals

·  Millions of journal articles available through Search Tools.

[Switch to PPT slide and click to show Find e-Journals.]

·  Find e-Journals function allows you to search for and look through the journals we have online

·  So if you are looking for an article that you know already appeared in the journal called “Science”, the E-Journals list will allow you to look for the journal Science by title, and then you can search within in it for the particular article.

B. Find Databases

[click to show Find Databases on PPT]

·  What if you don’t know the name of a particular journal to search? Databases will allow you to search across many journals all at once.

[click to show how Find Databases works on PPT]

·  Which journals depend on which database you use. For example, the “Social Sciences Abstracts” database will search for articles inside thousands of different social science journals.

C. Quick Search

[click to show Quick Search in PPT]

·  What if you don’t know a particular journal and can’t decide on just one database? Search Tool’s “Quick Search” is one more level up in searching.

·  We have access to hundreds of databases, and “Quick Search” will allow you to search across many databases at a time. This is called “meta-searching” or “cross-searching”. There are drawbacks, too – we’ll explain these when we talk about “Quick Search” specifically.

D. SearchTools is not the library catalog.

[Open up library gateway page: http://lib.umich.edu/]

·  A catalog is a list of everything that the library owns or has access to described at the level of entire books and entire journals.

[Be sure to point out Mirlyn link on library web page, or even open up Mirlyn briefly to emphasize that it is completely different from Search Tools.]

·  The databases that you’ll see in SearchTools are where you will find citations to articles from journals and sometimes chapters from books.

·  How do you get to Search Tools? Follow the link from the library web page.

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II. Demonstrate layout of Search Tools interface

·  The powerpoint slide was a simplified visualization of Search Tools.

·  Five different tabs when you open Search Tools: Quick Search, Power Search, Find Databases, Find E-Journals, and My Search Tools.

·  As we move from tab to tab, notice that the page header looks the same, but the bottom part of the screen changes quite a bit at each new tab.

·  Instead of following this order of the tabs on the screen, we will look at the simplest tabs first.

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III. Have everyone log in

·  If you are going to do any personalized functions in SearchTools you will need to be logged in. Since we’ll be doing some of these later in the class, let’s log in right from the beginning.

·  Wait to see if anyone has any problems with logging in.

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IV. Find E-JournalsThe Find E-Journals function will take you out of Search Tools to the E-Journals website.

·  If you are looking for a particular journal, you know its name and you want to see if the library has electronic access to it, click on the Find eJournals tab.

·  You will normally search by journal name.

·  Let’s use an actual citation. Let’s say a professor gave you this, and you had to find it:

Choose one of these citations and point to where you’ve written it on the board:

·  Lawrence, A. (2006) “Legacy of a Longhorns Legend.” Sports Illustrated, January 7th, 2006, p. 79.

OR

Taylor, P. (2005) “Big Ten Takes a Hit.” Sports Illustrated, September 19, 2005, p. 112.

·  Can put in a title or can search alphabetically.

·  Let’s try entering Sports Illustrated.

·  To go to the actual journal from here, click on one of the links to the electronic version. [Make sure to navigate through to the actual article.]

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V. My SearchTools

·  My Search Tools is the part of Search Tools that you will use when you want to save anything to retrieve later in another Search Tools session.

·  If I regularly consult a particular journal and, therefore, want to have a quick link to that title, I can save some of these links to specific journals in a more personalized space in SearchTools called MySearchTools.

·  This is one example of a personalized function for which you need to be logged in.

·  Let's return to our results page for Sports Illustrated – we can “bookmark” it by clicking on the + link.

·  Let’s do another one – how about a journal called Journal of personality and social psychology. (Run a search for this title) Clicking on the + link will put a link to this title in MySearchTools.

·  Return to Search Tools and click on the MySearchTools tab. Notice that I can save links to databases, journals, specific preferences within SearchTools and so on.

·  Click on the My eJournals tab. Notice that both titles appear here.

·  I can either click on the link to it or I can use the x button to remove it from my list. I can also use the garbage can icon to remove all the entries I have in this section.

[Allow play time if you have it – Ask students to find E-Journals of their choice and move to My SearchTools]

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VI. Find Databases

·  What if you want to search several journals at once? Databases give you a way to do this – they often collect together a bunch of different journals/sources that all focus on the same subject area.

·  If I know of a particular database that I want to use, then I can click on Find Databases.

A. Find known item by name

·  I want one of the LexisNexis databases since I’ve heard that it covers lots of newspapers. So I’ll put lexisnexis in the searchbox.

·  Click on the i button to find out more information about the database. On the second entry I find that this is the database that I want (LexisNexis Academic is the database that contains a large number of newspapers) and I could click on the link to go to the database.

B. Truncation

·  What happens if I don’t know for sure how to spell lexisnexis? I’m going to click on Find Databases again and then I’m going to enter part of the name. I’m pretty sure it starts with lex and then I’m going to put a ? after that.

·  Explain truncation.

·  I’m also going to change from “Contains” which would give me that root word anywhere in the search to “Begins with” so that it’s only looking for databases that start with that root. Run search.

C. Find unknown database (browse by subject)

·  Find Databases can also help if you’re not sure what database to use.

·  Click on Find Databases and subject tab.

·  One of the things to remember in general about SearchTools is that it often takes awhile to load a page or to run a command. So make sure the page is fully loaded before you do anything else.

·  Let’s say that I need to write a paper on the genetics behind Down syndrome. Which subject should I choose? Which sub-subject would I choose?

·  I would click on the “Science” link and then wait for the subcategories to change. Then I would click on “Genetics”. [Could also do Health Sciences and Genetics]

·  Note that the number next to the subcategory refers to the number of databases relevant to this subject area.

[A search in genetics abstracts for down syndrome, should you want to run a search at this point or if you want to stay with this topic, gives a nice results list – choose an item ahead of time that has access to the full text through SFX]

·  Let’s say that I need to write a paper on body image and the television media – what might I look for then? [Browse by subject for “social sciences” then “communications”.]

·  For communications, you’ll find a ranked list of databases and the name of the librarian to consult.

·  So you’ll use Find Databases when you are trying to find a database in a particular subject field or when you know exactly which database you want and you just want to go to that database.

·  If Find Databases for a particular category brings up a large number of databases and you’re still puzzled about which of those databases would be the best one to use, you might want to consult with the librarian who is a specialist in that area.

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VII. Create sets in My Search Tools

[LexisNexis cannot be searched in the Search Tools interface. For our Power Search example, you will want to have at least one searchable database saved to your "My Databases." ComAbstracts, ArticleFirst and America History and Life are all okay.]

·  Notice that just as with the ejournals, you can click on the plus link to add a particular database to your MySearchTools if this is a database you’ll want to consult regularly. Let’s say from this list of communications databases, I’m going to add ComAbstracts to my list, along with ArticleFirst.

·  You can use My Search Tools to create a personalized list of databases – in Search Tools, these are called “folders”.

·  Let's switch back over to My Search Tools and then select the "My Databases" tab. The databases that we selected will appear on the Clipboard on the right side of the screen.

·  Next, select the "folder" icon on the left side of the screen to create a folder where you can save your databases. A dialog box will appear.

·  Enter a name and description for your folder/set, and then click on the "Save" button.
Be sure that the folder/set you have created is displaying in the "Select Set" pull down menu on the left.

·  In the Search Tools Clipboard, use the "arrow" icon in the Actions column to copy databases to the new folder/set that you have created.

·  Please note that there is a system limitation of 8 databases.

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VIII. Search from library gateway page

·  I want to show you a way to use the Find eJournals and Find Databases functions without even going directly into SearchTools.

·  Click on the Library Homepage. Point out the search box and type in PsycInfo. Page down to show Databases category of results.

[Allow play time if you have it – ask students to find databases in their fields of interest and add them to personal sets in My Search Tools.]

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IX. Quick Search

**[Once class has gone to this section, ask them to sit back and watch what you are doing. Explain that too many people searching at one time will overwhelm the system. Also – if you have already created personalized sets/folders, your Quick Search will be slightly different from theirs.]**

Let’s assume that your class assignment is to compile a bibliography on a topic. You have to research the topic and list several citations to newspaper or journal articles. You can begin your research in Quick Search.

·  A quick search lets you search a select number of databases in a broad field to get a rough idea of what kinds of entries you will find in the database