Lesson 7

Observations about WorldCat.

1. In the first task we were to check out all the different ways to search instead of Keyword.  There are many other options including the usual Author, Subject, and Title as well as specific subcategories within those categories.  Something I thought was useful was to search by material type, and something I have never thought to do is to search Musical Composition.

2. For the Title Phrase Search, I searched for "The Time Machine".  This resulted in 1,156 results.  1,270 libraries have the #1 result which was "Seven Science Fiction Novels".  The top library is the Brookings Public Library of 6 libraries in South Dakota.

3. The call numbers (Class Descriptors) are LC: PZ3.W465; PR5772; Dewey: 813.0876 .  When I clicked on the Author's Name, another search page opened up with other books as well as tabs along the top that would limit the results to Books, Internet sources, Sound, Visual, Archival, Articles, Scores, Serials, Computer, and Maps.  There was also listed how many results in each catagory.  When I clicked on the subject of Science Fiction - English, I ended up with 6,164 results in another search.  Again, there were all the subheadings to refine my search.

When looking at the other FirstSearch Indexes, when a database is chosen and you click on the i, a window opens that give you information about that database and the subjects it covers.

In the last part of the assignment, the subject phrase search for South Dakota resulted in 827 results.  I chose to take a look at a Visual Material result called "En route to Black Hills".  Which, interestingly enough is owned by the Tulane University Library.  It provided a description of what the picture was of in the Abstract and who took the picture as well as other information about the item.  Over all this resource is very easy to use.