Table of Contents | Introduction | Resources | Search Strategies | Overall Search Strategy | Example Searches | Checklist and Hints & Tips | Glossary and Connection Details

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5. Example Searches

5.1 Example Search 1 - Occupational Stress

This is a search for additional sources about the work of J. Handy on occupational stress.

1. The starting point is, as with most searches, the Library. Connecting to the catalogue and selecting an author search for handy, j returns this list:

Selecting the second entry gives the author entry:

The second of these is a Lancaster PhD Thesis. The first is a book:

2. The first extra piece of information we have found from the Library is that her middle initial is A - this can be important in some search systems. We have also found the classmark for the book - so we look at other books with the same classmark as they may also be relevant. An easy way to do this is to use the Navigate option at the bottom of the screen. Selecting X gets to this screen:

Selecting the classmark (C) will show the books which have been classified next to this work - so there is a good chance they will be relevant as well:

Using the Forward and Backward options to move around this list shows that the Library has a large number of books on stress.

3. The book is obviously a good source but we will persevere and see what we can find elsewhere. The next most productive source is usually the BIDS range of databases. Of these, the largest is the ISI database. It provides a choice of 4 databases:

Occupational stress is probably best represented in the Social Science database. The main screen of any database at BIDS is the Search Menu, such as:

As we are primarily interested in the author we will try an Author name search, option 3. As we already know the middle initial we can search for HANDY_JA. This produces zero hits - not that surprising because we have only searched 1993-6 - the database actually goes back to 1981. To change this we can go to the Options menu. Once we have changed the year range we can re-execute the search very easily using the extra option on the search menu

This only appears after we have done a search as until then there weren't any previous search sets to re-use! It shows a record of all the searches we have done:

As we have changed the year range to 1981-1996 we can ask for this search by simply entering the search set number, in this case 1. This performs the same search on the new expanded year range and returns us to the search menu with:

There are 6 hits. Pressing D takes us to the Display menu where we can examine these hits:

These options provide us with views of the hits at different levels of detail. Option 3 will provide us with abstracts (if present):


Here we have lots of good information: 6 entries in journals. The main points to note here are:

The next stage is to return to the Lancaster catalogue and see if the Library actually stocks any of these journals.

At this point we could also consider using some other resources that we haven't considered yet:

4. Returning to Lancaster and using the online catalogue (Serials / Journals option) shows us that the Library does have Human relations and does have Volume 41 Number 5:

It also has Social Science and Medicine Volume 32 Number 7:


However it does not stock the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society.

5. Finally, we could try and find out where and what Jocelyn Handy is doing now. The simplest way to do this is a Web search. Using Alta Vista with a search of "Jocelyn Handy" produces 2 hits:

The first of these, Massey University in New Zealand, has Jocelyn Handy listed as teaching a course - navigating to the Department of Psychology staff list shows in the list of Lecturers:

And the list of Staff Research Interests shows:


Although I thought Alta Vista hadn't picked up these pages because of the extra initial in the search term, adding the initial doesn't help -Alta Vista returns no hits. This shows that it doesn't necessarily index all of the Web - or possibly that the pages have changed since it last updated its index.

The second hit was a publisher's catalogue entry for the book we had already located in the University Library.

5.2 Example Search 2 - a search for an unknown article

This is search undertaken by one of the authors and illustrates the coordinated use of several different strategies and resources.

1. The search started when a friend mentioned that she had read an interesting article about libraries (particularly Harvard library) in the New Yorker magazine about a year ago. The article sounded interesting but she could remember no more information.

2. The first action was to see if the Lancaster Library had the New Yorker, this was a title search on the Serials / Journals index for new yorker, the top of the results page was:

A quick forward and backward browse confirmed that the Library didn't take this particular periodical. If it had done then the quickest strategy would probably have been to physically scan the contents pages. As this wasn't possible I needed to try to find out the full publication information about the article, i.e. author, issue, page numbers etc.

3. The first place I tried was BIDS. I connected to ISI and tried a Journal Title search for New Yorker in both the Humanities and the Social Sciences indices. Nothing. I tried the same in the IBSS database: nothing. I tried the BL Inside Information database and:

The pre-set year range was too wide at this point so I restricted it to just 1995 - as my friend had been quite sure of the date. The result:

Nothing. Restricting the year range to 1996 produced 266 hits. All the hits were in the current year - presumably they had only just starting including this journal in the database.

4. The next database I tried was Uncover, also available via the BIDS gateway. I chose the 'Browse by journal title' option, the top of the result set:

Choosing 1 produced


Selecting E for the current issue information:


I scrolled down the display and the it showed that Uncover indexed the New Yorker back into 1994 and earlier. Although at this stage I could have sequentially searched all the 1995 table of contents but there was a better way. I returned to the main menu and selected word or topic search. The examples on the screen showed that you could combine a journal title with a keyword search, their examples included:

Now I had to try and select a word which I thought might be in the article's title: the two most obvious were Harvard and library/libraries. I tried new yorker harvard as a search and got:

Three were articles from the New Yorker magazine, none of them seemed particularly likely (the titles weren't right and neither were the dates) so I tried library new yorker, and:


The second item seemed a bit strange but the date was about right, I selected it:


Success! This was almost certainly the right article. I had almost the full publication information - the only thing that was missing was how long the article was. Returning to the table of contents (now that I knew the issue number) index I found:


The article appeared to end at page 27. In an academic journal this would be fine but as the New Yorker is a magazine articles are sometimes continued later in the issue.

5. I now had the article details and could send an inter-library loan request. However at the time of writing this has been restricted to essential requests only. So as an alternative strategy I turned to the Web. Perhaps the New Yorker has a Web site with back issues. Using Alta Vista a entered a query of "New Yorker". This produced lots of hits on safety notices for the Chrysler New Yorker model of car. Looking back at the search so far sometimes it seemed to be referred to as "The New Yorker", I tried that instead.

None of the URLs that were returned were anything like www.newyorker.com, as might be expected in an official site. One was called 'The New Yorker Page', I selected that. On the page was some text:

This seemed to indicate that it was unlikely that the magazine had a Web site. Another alternative was that the author, David Remnick, had made the article available on the Web himself. I tried "David Remnick" in Alta Vista, there were 56 hits. Several were related to a book he had written called Lenin's Tomb, which I found out had won the Pullitzer Prize (General Nonfiction) in 1994. However, there was no hint of an online version of the article.

7. It looked like I was going to have to try and get it from a UK source. I tried the COPAC online database - a large collection of several university library catalogues. Trying a journal search I got:


Going to Edinburgh's Library catalogue (via NISS) to check:


6. As the article was not crucial enough to warrant an inter-library loan request I asked one of my friends at Edinburgh if he could photocopy it and send it to me.

7. However, when he got there he found that they didn't have all the copies - something

that wasn't obvious from their catalogue - but the National Library of Scotland, next door, did!

Summary: the eventual successful nature of this search shows the combination of several strategies (keyword-based, person-based, publication-based) in several resources (BIDS, Uncover, Web, COPAC).

5.3 Example Search 3 - Web Search: our 'Last Best Hope'

As a fan of the TV science fiction programme 'Babylon 5, I was intrigued by their opening credits that used the phrase "our last best hope". It seemed familiar. I wondered if it came from another source. I decided to use the world wide web to investigate the phenomenon. I chose to use the search engine Alta Vista whose URL is: http://www.altavista.digital.com/

They claim to have indexed 30 million web pages and allow you to search the contents of those pages. As well as searching for the presence of several words in a document, one can also search for phrases by enclosing the words in quotation marks.

I searched on the phrase "last best hope". This yielded 700 hits (Alta Vista gives approximate numbers for large numbers of hits):


his was far too many. It seemed that a large number of hits, not surprisingly were about Babylon 5. Now it may be that one of those just happened to explain the origin of the phrase. But I suspected it would take far too long to read through them all to find out.

Instead I decided to look at all documents that used "last best hope", but did not talk about Babylon 5. The best way seemed to use the exclusion operator NOT, described above.

In Alta Vista, you exclude a word by putting - in front of it. So my new search was:


This looked more promising: although there were still 300 hits (too many to look through them all), it was clear that among them were various links to Abraham Lincoln.

One way to home in on Lincoln is to find all the pages that have both "last best hope" AND Lincoln. In Alta Vista you do this using + in front of all the elements that must occur.

Hence:

Surprisingly, this yielded 103 hits. Although 103 is too many to read in detail, it was fairly easy just to skim over the returned page titles along with a small extract of the text that Alta Vista returns as a search result. With so many hits this is a matter of hitting the next link to get the subsequent page of results. By clicking on a few of the more promising ones, I discovered the following extract:

However, this does not mean that Lincoln was the first to use that phrase. How can we found out who else used it?

Looking through the other hits reveals that the phrase was also used by Ronald Reagan.

It is possible to find more details by an appropriate searches (just those documents that use the phrase and also the word Reagan

This yields 58 hits. Many of these point to the same speech transcribed by different people. However it was clearly a popular phrase for Reagan and his speech writers. He used it on many occasions, including a speech to Eureka college in 1957, the 'evil empire speech', after the downing of the Korean airliner, a state of the union address, his eulogy after the Challenger disaster in 1986 as well as his second inaugural address on 21/1/85:

Eliminating some of the people we know about:

and looking through the hits we find that the phrase was also used by John F. Kennedy. Again we can find more details by a more precise search:

Skimming the other returned hits from the search "last best hope" -babylon -Lincoln -Reagan don't seem to reveal anything very promising, particularly of people using the phrase before Lincoln. Of course we can't be certain without going to the page of every hit, but with 200 that is just too many to bother with so we have to make instant judgements and acknowledge that we may overlook something important. Note that the search query may have eliminated some documents that we want to look at. What if there is a document that quotes some person earlier than Lincoln using the phrase, but just happens to also use the word Lincoln somewhere in its text? Our search request says that we aren't interested in that document, but of course we are.

Therefore I returned to carry on looking through the 103 hits of an earlier search:

I came across one entitled Niles and the New South:

http://infolink.runet.edu/~wkovarik/Niles.html

On following the link I discovered that it was about Hezekiah Niles, a famous journalist of his time, the publisher of the Niles Weekly Register in Baltimore, Maryland.

The page included the following quotation from 1829:

Given the fame and importance of the paper, Lincoln is very likely to have read Niles Weekly Register, if not the actual article of 1829.

Notes

Further searching (based on a hunch that as this was so popular with presidents, maybe they had copied it from earlier presidents in modified form) revealed an even earlier presidential precursor of the phrase:

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C. Wednesday, March 4, 1801

From a search on: +"best hope" +president +inaugural

On re-running the search for this report, it seems that the URL for Niles and the New South is not currently available. Maybe it is available again when you read this, or maybe it has gone forever, or maybe it has moved and we need to search for it all over again (at least we know what we're are looking for now though). This is a useful reminder of the ephemeral nature of information on the Web: Web pages get edited, deleted and moved around so that a URL may not link to anything in the future of to something substantially modified compared to when it was last looked at.

Finding this reference involved skimming through a list of 103 hits, looking out for promising ones and clicking on them to look at the page in general. This is very laborious, but goes to show that there may not always be a neat trick by combining search terms that lets you get to the information you want in a single step. However it is worth taking some time to think if there is such a trick as it is all to easy to waste huge amounts of time in fruitless or inefficient searching.

Note that searching on the World Wide Web can be very time consuming, even using Alta Vista which is very powerful. As the Alta Vista site is based in the USA, all your queries and the results have to cross the Atlantic and compete with all the other traffic. Therefore it is better to do Web based searching in the morning in the UK while most of the USA is still asleep and the transatlantic traffic is less busy.

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