Writing 101: Friendship

Keywords

Keywords are key! They unlock our ability to communicate with library systems and resources.

Let's use chimney sweep as an example.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Is this the term used in the location and time period of my topic?

• How else can I express this term? Broader? Narrower?

  • child labor

  • climbing boys

  • chimney sweep apprentice

Equipping ourselves with language enables us to be creative and strategic in our searching.

Broader and Narrower Terms

Broader terms to consider:

child employment AND industry (farming, mining, etc.)

Legislation or policy about child labor

Apprenticeships

Workhouses and other government-run institutions

Narrower terms to consider: 

porter OR messenger

"shop girl"

Tailor OR seamstress

cotton OR wool factory OR manufact*

Truncation is a bit tricky to explain. 

Are we opening up a trunk full or possibilities? Reaching with the trunk of an elephant for more options? That's TBD.

Truncation is, again, another strategy we can apply to communicate with library systems and databases. Like boolean operators, keywords, and punctuation, we indicate what we want in our results list.

We use the *asterisk* to show what we'd like to truncate (sometimes a question mark? or dollar$ sign) Truncate actually means to cut off, but we are actually expanding our results. More details below...

We use the root of the word to create room for the possible stems.

librar* => library, libraries, librarian...

chimney sweep* => sweep, sweeps, sweeping, sweeper...

Learn more from MIT.

Truncation is like a wild card and may be called this in databases.

And, Or, Not

Boolean who?

Boolean operators are terms we can use to create search phrases. 

AND, OR, NOT

They help us communicate with databases in a way that helps us indicate what's important to us.

To the right is an example of using boolean operators to search for your boo ;) on a dating app.

Our advice? Click into the record! You'll see all sorts of tools to use from a stable link to bookmark, a formatted citation, and how to access or request the item.

The item record also includes subject level labels that describe it. You can click on these to run searches about the topics covered in your item.