|
|
The College
of St. Scholastica Library Lab
Worksheet
One: Database Searching |
Access PALS at http://www.pals.msus.edu/webpals/
Select and click on the “Search
PALS” button.
The page you are now at is titled
“Select Library and Resource.” If you are on a networked computer on the
CSS campus, PALS will be defaulted to search the CSS catalog. If you are
off-campus, directly below this title is a drop down box with the word
“Library” on the left hand side. The current library displayed is listed
as “All libraries.” Click on the arrow on the right hand side of the box
and select “College of St. Scholastica.”
Now click on the blue, oval
“Go” button. You are ready to begin Worksheet One: Databases Searching.
On PALS, choose Title, exact (omit
initial article) if you are sure of the exact title - you are working from
a bibliography or your class syllabus, or you trust the person's memory
who told you about the book.
| 1. Always omit the initial
article of a title (a, an , the) - To the computer, the book A Distant
Mirror is "Distant Mirror." This is done to avoid the problem of a
majority of books being alphabetized by either "a" or "t". |
| 2. Only use the first
four words of the title and subtitle (the title and subtitle of the book
are usually separated by a colon). The title field is only searchable with
an exact search for the first four words. If you have a twelve word title,
save yourself some typing. |
| 3. Spell it right. Get
the order of the words in the title right - Grimm Brothers and Brothers
Grimm are two different searches. |
| 4. Don't worry about
capitalization - a good database is "case insensitive" - meaning it recognizes
an uppercase letter (capital) or a lowercase letter (small) as the same
letter. |
|
| Keyword
searching the title field |
On PALS, choose Title, keyword
if you know only a few words of the title, or if you are not sure that
your title is correct.
| 1. Words may appear in
any order. With a key word search, "Grimm Brothers" and "Brothers Grimm"
are equal searches. |
| 2. You will be searching
every word in the title field, not just the first four. You only need to
have one word from the title in order to retrieve the record for the book.
However, you may be surprised by what you might find. |
| 3. Again, spell it right,
and don't worry about capitalization. |
1b. How many items does the
CSS Library own with both the words ‘women’ and ‘healers’ in the title?
|
|
|
|
