"Take advantage of opportunity!"

Friday, February 15, 2013

Lesson 4 - Proquest


Hello!
1)      Patron or student is interested in literary criticism of Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables. NOT interested in anything about the musical theater or movie version.
Okay, the first time I worked with this request, I did click on full-text but I didn’t see a right side bar and I didn’t click on Advanced Search and a total of 5,361 popped up. Returning to the search box, I kept the full-text and did go into Advanced Search and I smiled, the side bar appeared. With the advanced search I could eliminate musical and dis-associate other unwanted terms. Choosing the drop down and “not” I still wasn’t getting better results.
 
I opened “more” options with the click of the plus sign, for ‘document type’ and ‘subject’ limiters, clicking each item as exclude or include, even at that still searches appeared with theatrical reviews but dropped the number drastically to 730.  Removing some of the included into excluded even happiness and results were lower. But, I redid the entire search as I was confusing myself. I selected advanced search, in the Document type I chose article, book, commentary, literary review and speech lecture. A happier result with 305 items, I went back and clicked on Source, such as books, reports and conference papers searching again with surprising number of zero results. Unclicking the Source item, I returned to the 305 items.  I didn’t search through them all, the one’s I did, I didn’t see one musical or movie version result. That was my goal and some interesting items.
2)     Using advanced search and full text typing in Hurricane Sandy AND impact on libraries requesting last 7 days produced zero results. Expanding time frame to 3 months locating 30 results and an article in the School Library Journal. Keep trying! Limiting the subject search to libraries, results are 3.  Dec 2012 and Jan 7, 2013. Changing time frames seems to be the indicator on number of results. Am sure there are better ways of searching for this as I’ve heard news stories on destruction of libraries, just not sure how to get those results here.

1 comment:

Fabric and Books said...

Thanks for your Proquest post. The limiters on the right hand side of the page on a search (they show up after you've done a basic or an advanced search)are a great way to limit results. It sounds like you were successful in limiting the information returned.

Regarding the impact of libraries and Hurricane Sandy. It sounds like you found good information. Impact does not need to imply damage. Excellent use of the date limiters--they can really provide a picture of when the topic was in the news!
Thanks,
-Julie