Lesson Goal:Locate a book in the library about a person using the library catalog, and then to go out and find books about that person in the library.
If you do a simple keyword search (called Any Word Anywhere) in the library catalog for Stephen Hawking, You should get something like this:
You Searched: Any Words = stephen hawking
Search Results: Displaying 1 through 20 of 9634 entries.
What you'll notice is there are many books about the life of Stephen Hawking, but also some other things, like books about modern cosmologists, theoretical discussions about physics, and George’s secret key to the universe by Lucy Hawking (Stephen Hawking's
daughter). So the keyword method works, but it's not too efficient for finding biographies.
A more precise way to find biographical materials is the Subject search. Libraries group books on similar topics together, using standardized lists of words to describe the items in a catalog, like a database for books! A specific word, or heading is assigned to a specific topics. When topics are grouped this way it helps focus the results you get so things that are off topic are left out, making your search more efficient.
To search for books about the life of Stephen Hawking.
1. Choose the subject option from the drop-down menu
2. Put the name of the person you are looking for biographies about Last Name, First Name (Make sure you put the last name first, or your the name in your results will be out of order.
The results from the Subject search (and Author searches too look) different than Any Word Anywhere search (or Google results).
First, you have to search by the person's last name, then first name!
Incorrect Example:
You Searched: Subject = stephen hawking
(notice the name is in the wrong order for the Subject search and what should be the first name you are looking for appears as the last name.) This gives you a list of names that represent the first name of the person you were looking for as the last name, like Sir James Fitzjames Stephen!
Correct Example:
When the names are reversed, the results show a number of books on the subject of Stephen Hawking's life!
