Search Everything?!?!

Mackenzie Brooks // brooksm@wlu.edu

Assistant Professor & Digital Humanities Librarian // English Department Liaison

Fall Academy, August 26, 2015

Agenda

Breeze through the history of information retrieval.
Explore the inner workings of Search Everything.
Reveal search tips for Google Scholar and Google.
Discuss student research challenges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#/media/File:The_Burning_of_the_Library_at_Alexandria_in_391_AD.jpg

https://www.flickr.com/photos/8601342@N03/4549779936/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software)#/media/File:Dynix-Main-Menu-via-Telnet.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Google1998.png

"Too Big to Know"

Knowledge now lives not just in libraries and museums and academic journals. It lives not just in the skulls of individuals. Our skulls and our institutions are simply not big enough to contain knowledge. Knowledge is now a property of the network, and the network embraces businesses, governments, media, museums, curated collections, and minds in communication.

Weinberger, David. Too Big to Know : Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Research difficulties experienced by college freshman:

1. Formulating effective and efficient online searches

2. Identifying, selecting, and locating sources

3. Reading, comprehending, and summarizing materials

4. Figuring out faculty’s expectations for research assignments

Head, Alison J. "Project Information Literacy Research Report: Learning the Ropes.” Project Information Literacy Research Report, December 4, 2013.

Search Everything is:

a discovery tool/system/service
something we pay for
potentially biased
one of the best of its kind
still not perfect
constantly changing

Everything =

384,267 e-books
94,735 e-journals
513,255,675 records
975,050 catalog items (mostly print)
1.5 billion citations
90 content types

Demo

Search tips

Use quotes for phrase searching
Use wildcards
- * matches 0+ characters
- ? matches a single character
Use Boolean operators AND, NOT, OR
Use refinements/filters or advanced search

Remember

You have to tell Search Everything that you know what you're looking for.

Google Scholar

Updates quicker that Search Everything
Handles open access material well
Finds freely available PDFs
Decent relevancy, especially for journal articles
Integrates with library holdings
- Settings > library links

Google search tips

Search tools
- Verbatim search (rather than quotes)
- Time-based search
site:wlu.edu
filetype:pdf
mustang -ford