From the course: Information Literacy

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Search terms and methods: Keyword vs. controlled vocabulary

Search terms and methods: Keyword vs. controlled vocabulary

From the course: Information Literacy

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Search terms and methods: Keyword vs. controlled vocabulary

- Searching online seems like a simple task and many people do it on a daily basis but there are various methods you can use to search effectively. You may be thinking, "Hey, I look for things online "all the time using Google and I find what I need. "Isn't that enough?" Well, I'm going to share a few librarian tricks with you. We are going to do a few sample searches to highlight strategies which can be used in both your library's online public access catalog, OPAC, and in online research databases. We're going to focus on keywords or free language terms, subject headings, and controlled vocabulary and authority files. Knowing how these search strategies work and how they differ will yield different results. Let's examine them in more detail. First let's start with keyword searching or free language terms. You are probably most familiar with keyword searching if you are the sort of person who Googles things to look them up. By searching Google you are typing in the words which come…

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