"Hurricane" and "Fredrick" did not provided any hits for me under the school's library catalog. So I would like to change my search to Hurricane Katrina since it was also a gulf coast hurricane, so I used the terms "Hurricane" and "Katrina" to see if i could find anything that would touch upon my topic. These terms provided 112 hits.
bibliographic information:
1.
a. Seeking higher ground : the Hurricane Katrina crisis, race, and public policy reader
b. 1st edition
c. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke
d. New York
e. Palgrave Macmillan
f. 2008
2.
Location: Book Stacks
Call Number: HV636 2005.N4 S44 2008
Status: On Shelf
3.
Hurricane Katrina, 2005 -- Social aspects
Disasters -- Social aspects -- Louisiana -- New Orleans
Disaster relief -- Louisiana -- New Orleans
Marginality, Social -- Louisiana -- New Orleans
African Americans -- Government policy -- Louisiana -- New Orleans
New Orleans (La.) -- Race relations
New Orleans (La.) -- Politics and government
4.
I chose the subject heading Hurricane Katrina, 2005 -- Social aspects because I thought that it was the closest to my topic because of the fact that it was actually about hurricane Katrina while the others were not. After clicking on this subject title I was presented with between 40 and 50 items relating to it in the index.
5.
a. Using these Subject headings to look for information on hurricane Katrina, I have much fewer results presented to me than when I was operating off of the keyword search. 112 results for keyword, and about 50 for the subject headings search.
b. These results are much more related to my topic than those of the keyword search. They are much closer to what I was searching for than the keyword ones.
c. This is because the keyword search is merely searching for the string of word that I typed, where as the subject titles searching using structured language programed by humans. Keyword searches are completely computer operated.
Research Log Entry
Keyword searches are searches that search for a specific string of words that you enter. They are programed through coding and are run completely by computer software. They have no human intervention what so ever. Heading searches on the other hand, even though still are programed by coding, use structured language and are based off of human intervention. People link certain documents to a related topic so that they will show up when the certain topic is searched. Heading searches provide much more relevant information to your searches.
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You definitely get the idea of subject headings, which is great.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of your changing your topic, that's fine, but you might want to think about why Katrina worked and Frederic didn't. Katrina was "big" enough to have whole books written about it. Frederic, clearly, was not. Either the damage was not as great or it didn't catch the national attention to the same degree.
You probably can find information about Frederic through the catalog. You would need to use broader headings, such as hurricanes, and then go to those books and check the indexes to see if Frederic was included as part of the larger whole.
When we get to databases, you might want to try searching for Frederic, just to see if it yields any results. By all means, stay with Katrina, if it interests you, but it would be interesting to see how many results you get for Katrina and how many for Frederic. There will be more for Katrina, I expect, but I also expect that there will be some for Frederic.
Just something to think about.