Searching on title keywords

5.6 Activity

Locate a library catalogue on the web and carry out five searches using its title keyword search function. You may like to use the CSU Library Catalogue for this activity. Make sure you include some common words in your title search (e.g., 'families', 'roads', 'trees'). Carefully note your search results and answer these questions:

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Calculate the percentage of your search results that matched the meaning of the word (or words) that you used in each of your keyword searches. What percentage was relevant for each search?
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Did the records you retrieved give subject terms that enabled you to retrieve search results that had a higher percentage of documents that were relevant to your initial searches?

I used the Port Stephens Library OPAC for my first two searches, and the Charles Sturt University library for the other three.

Words used, and how they fared:
- Home
Lots of cooking and DIY books. Some novels and picture books with the word 'home' in the title. Home mostly referred to as the house one lives in, though in a few cases referring to the community/country.
Very few titles had 'subjects' listed, and when they did there tended to only be one of these. Clicking on it brought up a list of similar subjects which linked to books fitting with those subjects. There were very few of these though, fitting with the fact that few texts have been allocated subjects to begin with.
- Trees
This was a successful search that brought up lots of texts about trees.
Once again linked to other similar subjects, but did not link to very many texts within each subject. Subjects appear to be very specific in some cases, and some texts are not allocated with one at all, both of these things explain why many subjects only have one text attached to them.
- Pencils
Produced many texts with information about pencils, but even more on how to use them.
CSU has different linking technique to Port Stephens library - takes you to other resources with the same subject, rather than a list of similar subjects. Most subject terms did not link to another text at all, but took you to the same text you had linked from. Some subjects however did have lots of texts linked to them (e.g. Text: 'The coloured pencil', subject: 'coloured pencils', linked to 21 items (narrowing it down from 32,282).
- Cats
Lots of resources about cats or with cats in them (i.e. stories about cats).
Many links to newspaper and scientific articles. Clicking on subjects seemed to increase the percentage of these types of articles.
- Water
Lots of resources about the substance (rather than the verb) which is appropriate to what I was thinking of.
Some texts had subjects that narrowed down the search, e.g. 'water conservation' which led to resources on this topic specifically.

It is interesting to see how different OPACS function using subject headings. It was also interesting to see the speed with which I was able to undertake the task increase as I got to know each OPAC and to get a feel for it. Now, on to the next chunk of reading... Lots to do, it's almost assignment time again! :-S