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Hello, I am David Davidson and this is a tutorial on searching by subject headings in databases.
Subject headings use controlled, or predetermined vocabulary to provide words or phrases that describe the contents of a work.
This controlled vocabulary produces more relevant results that a keyword search
but to search effectively, you have to know what the correct controlled vocabulary is.
We can solve this problem by searching for the proper subject headings in the database thesaurus.
A thesaurus is a searchable index of subject headings
and, once you find the appropriate subject heading, you can search using it in the main database.
In this demonstration, I will be using the H.W. Wilson full text database, from the Emporia State Library website
to search for information on childhood literacy.
This is the main page of the database. Any database that is hosted by EBSCO will look very similar.
We want to click on "Thesaurus," which you see circled in red
and this page will appear. We want to search in the thesaurus using this second search bar that is also circled in red,
and I am going to search for childhood literacy.
This is the result that we got. We are going to just try the first result - Children -- Books & Reading
so I am going to checkmark, and click "add," and then it will appear in the main search bar.
We can also search for multiple subject headings. We can keep clicking "add," and use Boolean operators, or, and, and not
just to the left of the "add" button to broaden or narrow the search with additional subject headings.
Then, when you're ready, just click the "search" button next to the main search bar.
And here are all the results for the subject heading "Children -- Books & Reading."
So, in conclusion, subject searches do produce more relevant results than keyword searches
but are less intuitive due to the special, controlled vocabulary.
One duty of librarians, which is what we all want to become, is to help patrons learn how to find reliable sources of information
So it is important that librarians know about using subject headings and thesauri
and that we can communicate this information with the public so that they can become better searchers as well.
This is the end of the presentation. I hope you learned from it and enjoyed it.