How To Use The Tufts Catalog Pt.1

Production Date: (Mar 8, 2007)

Welcome to Tisch Talks, Tisch Library’s ongoing audio magazine series. You’re listening to part one of the third installment of the series. During the next 8 minutes you will learn how to effectively search the Tufts Catalog to find books, videos, musical scores and much more. These 8 minutes will save you a lot of time, so listen carefully and review any parts that don’t make sense the first time.

Start at the Tufts catalog home page, http://library.tufts.edu/. I’ll wait a minute while you get there. <PAUSE> The catalog indexes the holdings of all Tufts libraries, except for articles and many older government documents, both print and electronic formats.

If you are looking at the catalog home page now, I’ll point out a few things before getting into searching. Horizontally along the top of the page is the ubiquitous blue bar, with shortcuts to the most used tools. Vertically along the left side is a bar with the searching modes, all of which I will describe to you.
Title searching is the default, so we’ll look at this first. Notice the instructions, to type as much of the title as you know, and to omit initial articles, no matter which language you are searching in. Note that you can limit your search to a particular Tufts collection. This means that if you want only videos or DVDs of Hamlet, you’ll do a title search, select videos/DVDs from the drop down menu to the right of the search box and then hit search. Much quicker than having to wade through the 137 Hamlets held in the entire Tufts library system.

On the left hand search bar, now select author searching. Note that the instructions are again simple. Type the last name first and note that an author can be any kind of organization (Tufts, American Academy of Nursing, United Arab Emirates or IBM). Note that you can limit your search to a particular Tufts collection, as demonstrated in title searching.

The next search mode we’ll look at is author/title searching. Try a search for Gittleman <SPELL> as an author and Tufts as the title. You can also search twain as author and finn as title. This kind of search is usually very forgiving, and it will often let you find all the variant titles that this book has had.

Journal title searching is used when you have the title of a journal, newspaper, or magazine. Again, skip initial articles. The advantage of searching this way can be demonstrated by doing a TITLE search for Rolling Stone. You come up with 43 entries! Do the same search as a journal title search and you find 2 titles.

We’ll look at the numerical searches (ISSN, ISBN and Music number) next. These methods let you search when you have this type of control number. Many people use ISSN and ISBN searches when they are searching publisher’s catalogs to see if Tufts already has a copy of a book or periodical they’re looking for. Music number searches function much the same way.

Course reserve searching is used when your instructor has put library materials on reserve. Select this mode and search either by the instructor’s last name or the course number.

The MeSH search uses medical subject headings. You won’t need to use this mode unless you are searching for technically oriented medical literature.

Last, but definitely not least, we will look at subject and keyword searches. Both are methods to search for materials by topic, and are often used alongside each other.

To do a successful subject search, you have to know the official library of congress subject heading. LC subject headings are used to maintain consistency of language to describe materials across libraries throughout the US. Keyword searching, on the other hand lets you use your own words and phrases, the down side is that keyword searches will more often find your words, but they may be out of context.
Some examples: do a keyword search for art and boston. Scroll to the 4th listing, titled Ernest Hemingway’s A farewell to arms: a documentary volume. Click on the title and you’ll notice the book has nothing to do with either art or boston, but the two words are part of the record, thus the book comes up. A slightly more specific keyword search, for architecture and boston, does yield some very good titles. More information on improving keyword searching is in part 2 of this installment.
To illustrate effective subject searching, we’ll actually do another keyword search, this time typing in history of china. Click on All Under Heaven: A Complete History of China. Then click on the subject heading China-History. You’ll see that there are over 100 other titles with this subject heading and furthermore, when you scroll down, you’ll see the same subject, divided by time period, to help you narrow down your topic if necessary. Don’t underestimate how useful subject headings can be to lead you to more materials on your subject.

Return to the screen where you originally selected All Under Heaven. This time, rather than clicking it, scroll down to China Yellow China Blue (a video) and click on it. Note: 1) this title has several subject headings, all of which will lead to other materials on the same subject. Click the 2nd heading China – Politics and government – 20th century and you’ll see lots of headings on the next page. 2) you can now limit this search to a particular Tufts collection. For example, if you want only materials held at the Ginn library, go to the Entire Collection drop down box and change it to Ginn. You can also limit your search to videos by selecting video/DVD. In part two of this installment, you’ll see how to use the advanced keyword search form to apply several limits simultaneously.

I mentioned before that to do successful subject searches, you have to know the library of congress subject heading. There are a few exceptions: do a subject search for death penalty and you will be directed to the correct heading, capital punishment. Do a subject search for Clemens Samuel and you will be directed to the official name to click on.

There is much more to using the Tufts Catalog, so do take some time to listen to How to Use the Tufts Catalog, part 2, soon.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this installment of Tisch Talks. We invite your questions at any time. Don’t hesitate to be in touch!


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