Robbins Library Notes

Good afternoon! I’d like to focus today’s post on highlighting how there can be multiple search strategies by which a question may be answered.

Last week, I received a question from a reader, asking me to illustrate how to locate materials in the database, Oxford Scholarship Online. My response gave a lengthy and detailed outline* of one way that the reader might go about finding an electronic version of Jeffrey King’s book, The Nature and Structure of Content.

A short time later, another reader added a comment to this post, outlining a simpler strategy using Google Scholar that gave the same results as my search. It’s definitely worth checking out, for comparison and contrast.  Which one was the better strategy to follow?

The short answer is that neither one is better than the other. It’s true, as I’ve written, that “how” you set up your search is often more important than “where” you look, but, in many cases, there are several ways to get at the answer to a question. This isn’t a bad state of affairs, for many reasons:

• Using multiple search strategies can help you to better triangulate your results.
• Doing so can keep you from falling into a search rut, using one and only one strategy to locate every thing, or automatically relying on one database as the only source of information.
• Following from this, multiple search strategies also helps to keep you from developing blind spots in researching.
• It’s a good excuse to consult with others on a question, to learn about new ways and perspectives on doing searches and locating information.

So, if you have an alternative search strategy to one that I post on this blog, please don’t hesitate to let me know, so that I can post it, with your permission.

Please keep the questions and comments coming. I look forward to them!

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*While it might have seemed painfully long and drawn-out, readers should note that the process that I outlined is, in effect, the slow-motion version of searching, highlighting basic steps that become second nature as you grow in searching proficiency. If you were to run this search at “normal speed,” it would take only a few minutes to do.