How To Use The Tufts Catalog Pt.2

Production Date: (Mar 29, 2007)

Welcome to Tisch Talks, Tisch Library’s ongoing audio magazine series. This is part 2 of the third installment of the series. During the next 9 minutes you will learn how to enhance the skills you’ve already developed by using more advanced methods of searching the Tufts Catalog to find books, videos, musical scores and much more. If you haven’t listened to part 1 of How to use the Tufts Catalog, you might want to do that before listening to this part.

Start at the Tufts catalog home page, http://library.tufts.edu/. Stop this recording while you make your way to that page. We will explore advanced keyword searching, so select that mode from the blue bar on the left of the screen.

You’ll notice that the advanced keyword search screen has more options on it than the other search screens. There are four search boxes instead of the single one that appears on most other screens. To see how the boxes work, do the following search. In the first box, type united kingdom. In the second box, type politics or government or history. In the third box, type nineteenth century or 19th century with nineteenth either spelled out or the number 19 followed by TH. Then click search. About 10 results will display. To understand how the computer interpreted and processed your search, look at the search history box near the top of the screen. You’ll see the computer grouped all the like terms together in parentheses, connecting those terms with OR. Then the computer connects all the groups together with AND. Essentially you’ve told the computer you want anything we have that includes the phrase united kingdom AND anything with the words politics, government or history AND anything that includes the nineteenth century (spelled two ways to account for variant titles). I’ll show you two ways to broaden your search to get more results, then several ways to narrow your search when you get too much.

To broaden your search, go back to the advanced keyword search screen and add some synonyms to the top box, such as Great Britain or England or Scotland or Wales or Ireland. Granted, some of these are broader or narrower terms than others. Even if you only add Great Britain, your results will increase to more than 1900.

Another way to broaden your search is by using asterisks. This is called truncating a search term or using wildcards. On the first line of an advanced keyword search screen, type gardening or horticulture. On the second line type china and click search. This search gives you only 1 title. To broaden this search, return to the advanced keyword search screen. On your first line, erase the ING in gardening and replace it with an asterisk. Erase the re at the end of horticulture and replace it with an asterisk, erase the A at the end of china and replace it with an asterisk. Then  click search. This time your results number over 70 titles. You have told the computer to find any titles that start with the root g-a-r-d-e-n, so beside garden, you will also get gardens, gardener, gardening etc. You’ll also now find Chinese instead of just china. Be aware that more does not always equal better. Click on Trauma and transcendence in early Qing literature, one of the first few titles, and note that the word garden appears, but not in the context we want.

To narrow your search, try one of these techniques.

Next we’ll look at another method for finding periodicals, which includes journals, magazines and newspapers. If you recall from part 1, when you know the title of the periodical and you want to see if Tufts subscribes to it, just do a journal title search. When you don’t have a particular title or when you want to know the names of periodicals we have on a particular topic, for example, mathematics, do a keyword search for mathematics and periodicals. Try to be fairly specific. If you’re really looking for journals on differential equations, you should search for differential equations and periodicals. Both print and electronic titles will display.

Now we’ll look at printing, emailing and importing titles to RefWorks. To print, email or save a long list of titles, it’s best to select the titles you want by clicking the box to the left of the record. After you’ve selected the titles you want on each page, click on Save Marked Records, then on View Selected (twice). You’ll come to a page where you can save your titles to your RefWorks account, email them, or send them to the screen to print them. If, on the other hand, you just want to import one title, or one screen’s worth of titles to your RefWorks account, check the box to the left of each title, then click on Export to RefWorks. RefWorks will open and your titles will be imported.

Let’s move from searching to some other features you have access to within the catalog. The first one is called My Account and you’ll find it in the horizontal blue bar at the top of every catalog screen. When you log in, you can see the titles you have checked out, renew books that aren’t overdue, review titles you’ve put a hold on, check on your fines, set up a reading history and preferred searches and search the catalog. To log in, you’ll need your UTLN and password or the barcode on the back of your ID that starts with 29090… When you log in, you’ll see your patron record, to which you can always return.

Now let’s look at the New Acquisitions List. Click on it in the horizontal blue bar. The New Acquisitions list lets you browse and/or search for new titles that have been added to the Tufts catalog during the most recent month. You can also set up RSS feeds of new acquisitions in your preferred blog reader.

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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