|
|
The College
of St. Scholastica Library Lab
Worksheet
One: Database Searching |
| Card
catalogs & MARC records |
All computer searching is not created
equal. It is common today to think of searching the Internet as “searching
the computer.” However, much of the scholarly information you will be asked
to find and use in your college classes is produced and owned by private
companies and not available for free access via the Internet. When you
search a database created by a private company, you are not searching the
text of the information (as you do when you search the Internet) but a
description of the information created by an information professional,
such as a cataloger or an indexer. The description of the information consists
of such items as the author, the title of the book or article, the publication
information, and subject headings (a description of what the book or article
is about). All the information about an individual book or an article in
a database is called its record.
One of the earliest databases
available for searching by computer, and one that still remains free to
use, is a library’s catalog. In its simplest sense, a catalog is
a list of books a library owns. Years ago this was expanded to three lists
within a list – a list of books a library owns arranged by author, a list
of books a library owns arranged by the title of the book, and a list of
books a library owns by subject. You may remember (fondly or not) the card
catalog with its rows and rows of drawers. Before the computer, the record
of a book was typed on a 3 x 5 inch card, which looked like this:
|
Each piece of information (author,
title, subject, etc.) that made up a book’s record was typed on a specific
line of the card and each book had three cards, one to search by author,
one to search by title, and one to search by subject.
In the late ‘60s the concept
of the paper card was transferred to a searchable computer format. This
“online” card was now called a book’s MARC record. Instead of information
being typed on a specific line of the card, it was entered in specific
field of the MARC record. Each field is given a number. Fields may have
subfields (represented by letters - #b). The following is a simplified
MARC record for the same book shown above on a catalog card –
|
Num.
|
Information
|
Name
of field
|
| 050 |
E757 #b .M8555 2001 |
Call number |
| 100 |
Morris, Edmund |
Author |
| 245 |
Theodore Rex / #c Edmund Morris. |
Title (and subtitle) of book |
| 250 |
1st ed. |
Edition statement |
| 260 |
New York #b Random House #c
c2001. |
Publication information |
| 300 |
x, 772 p. : #b ill., maps ;
#c 25 cm. |
Physical description of the
book |
| 500 |
Continues: The rise of Theodore
Roosevelt. |
General note |
| 504 |
Includes bibliographical references
(p [563] –571) and index |
General note (bibliographies
and indexes often represent quality information) |
| 600 |
Roosevelt, Theodore, #d 1858-1919 |
Subject |
| 650 |
Presidents #z United States
#v Biography |
Subject |
| 651 |
United States #x Politics and
government #y 1901-1909. |
Subject |
| 700 |
Morris, Edmund. #t Rise of
Theodore Roosevelt |
Added title |
The computer enhanced the ability
to search the records of books. In the old card system, one had to know
the exact author, title, or subject of a book in order to find it. With
an online database, order can be circumvented. One can search for the title
Theodore Rex or Rex Theodore and retrieve the same results. This is made
possible by field searching. To better understand field searching and how
it makes you a better searcher, and to help illustrate why a searching
a database is different than searching the Internet with Yahoo! or Google,
let's use this example –
Continue |
