School of Information Management
& Systems. Fall 2003.
142 Access to American Cultural Heritages. M. Buckland.
Assignment
7: Subject access in the Pathfinder Catalog. Due Oct 8.
Read the hand-out on Subject
Access. Library subject headings are commonly composed of multiple elements
strung together.
Searching is a two stage process: First find the heading(s); then find the
records associated with the heading(s). The Pathfinder catalog (http://sunsite2.berkeley.edu:8000/)
provides a two-stage process with the BROWSE command to find the headings,
then by clicking on the link to get the associated records. More commonly
one uses the SEARCH command which goes through the subject headings to the
records without stopping to show you what they the headings were. To see the
subject headings you can either (i) Use BROWSE to
display headings, or (ii) Use a SEARCH lookup, esp. on title words,
then change the DISPLAY settings to also display Subject headings to see what
is there.
The subject search commands:
In SEARCH:
Search for [your term] in su=Subject[phrase] looks for the wording in exact
order. Typing in "war crimes" retrieves records which contain that
subject heading exactly and nothing else so it retrieves WAR CRIMES but not,
say, WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL.
Search for [your term] in su:Subject[keyword]looks for any words, in any order.
Typing in "war crimes" retrieves records which contain any subject
heading containing either WAR or CRIMES or WAR CRIMES.
In
BROWSE.
Browse for [your term] in su=Subject[phrase] looks for the wording in exact order. Typing in
"war crimes" retrieves that subject heading exactly and nothing else
so it retrieves WAR CRIMES but not, say, WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL.
Browse for [your term] in su:Subject[keyword]looks for any words, in any order. Typing in "war crimes" retrieves any subject heading
containing either WAR or CRIMES or WAR CRIMES.
1. Suppose you wanted to search for books on the Blackfoot Native American
tribe.
1.1. Try SEARCH
BLACKFOOTin su=Subject[phrase]. How many records?
1.2. Try SEARCH
BLACKFOOT in su:Subject[keyword]. How many records?
1.3. For a
closer look at what is going on do BROWSE BLACKFOOT in su=Subject[phrase].
1.4. Re-do
1.2. What proportion
of the records from the keyword search in 1.2 are really about the
Blackfoot tribe?
Take a closer look at the 6threcord, by clicking on the title of the 6th record.
What is this book about?
1.5. Now do
BROWSE BLACKFOOT in su:Subject[keyword]. Which would work best as a search
query for this tribe?
2. There have been lots of books about the Vietnam War in the past decade. So
it should be easy to find a general, overall account of it - not a just one
aspect of it - in the Pathfinder. Do Limit by: yr: Year "1993-2003"which limits
searches to only material published in the last ten years.
2.1. SEARCH "VIETNAM WAR" in su=Subject[phrase]. How many records are retrieved?
2.2. How many does the broader search SEARCH VIETNAM
WAR in su:Subject[keyword]yield?
2.3. Take a look at the subject headings being used by changing the DISPLAY
options to include subject headings. Which subject heading is mostly used for
VIETNAM WAR in these records?
2.4. Now use BROWSE to check for the correct subject headings. Look for VIETNAM
WAR in su=Subject[phrase]. Is there another subject heading
describing the war? Find a record for a book about the war, click on the title
and look at the subject headings.
2.6. What happened? Comments?
3. Let's look for the Hoopa Indians in the Pathfinder
CATalog.
3.1. Try SEARCH HOOPA INDIANS in ti=Title[phrase].
How many did you find?.
3.2. BROWSE HOOPA INDIANS in su=Subject[phrase]. How many did you find? Look
at some the records to see the subject headings.
3.3. What is the best subject heading for this tribe? Check your hunch by doing
a BROWSE su=Subject[phrase]search with it.
4. Any non-subject field may help, e.g. for material about the Iroquois, try
their language SEARCH iro in ln=Language[phrase]. Use the MARC DISPLAY button (upper
right) to see the raw data behind one or two records. In which “field”
(numbered row) can you find the language?
5. When old records on cards were copied into electronic form, superseded forms
of subject heading were not usually updated. Some unorthodox subject headings,
not in the massive red Library of Congress Subject Headings list, also
exist in Pathfinder, and even a few typos. Pathfinder has cross-references
between variant authors' names, but it does not yet have them between subject
headings. Pathfinder has lots of books on the UNITED STATES and on