Robbins Library Notes

At left: “Multiple cloud-to-ground and cloud-to-cloud lightning strokes during night-time.” Source: NOAA.

Good morning, readers!  Happy Monday to you!

A few weeks ago, I received a very interesting request that I want to share with you, because it turned out to be more involved and trickier than I had originally anticipated.  Here’s how the search unfolded…

A patron contacted me, and was interested in learning what ancient philosophers (e.g., Thales, Aristotle, and the like) had called the phenomena of electricity and electromagnetism.  He was curious since the word “electricity” is of relatively recent origin — the Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of the word at around 1646 — even though these two phenomena were well-known in antiquity from observations of static electricity generated by amber and lodestone.   Armed with this information, I began to plan my search.

For the reader’s clarification: all of the text that follows in bold font are steps from my Searching 101: Guidelines post, to highlight the importance of focusing on the how of searching, i.e., the method of searching.

First off, what is the question? The question is, simply: what word or words did the ancient philosophers use to describe the phenomena of electricity and electromagnetism?  That’s fairly straightforward, and doesn’t require too much additional clarification.

Next, what search terms come to mind? “History,” “electricity,” “electromagnetism,” “Greek(s),” and “Thales” come to mind.  Also, knowing that classical discussions of electricity and electromagnetism arose out of observations of static electricity created by rubbing amber on cloth and of lodestone, we could add the terms “amber” and “lodestone” to the search as well.  Variants and truncated forms of these words should be considered, too, as part of the Synonym Game.

Thirdly, where should we look first? It’s generally best to start searching in a narrow space, and then broaden out the search.  As you read through where I looked, hopefully you will get a sense for this practice of applying Ockham’s Razor.

The first place I checked was Greek Thought: a Guide to Classical Knowledge, edited by Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd (Robbins Philosophy DF78 .S2813 2000), as this is usually a great source for information on the classical world.  However, none of the entries discussed views on electricity in the ancient world.  Nor did any of the encyclopedias that I consulted next — the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  Now was I getting intrigued.  None of these big sources were mentioning anything.

This omission isn’t completely surprising, given that the question focuses more on history of science than it does on philosophy. Nonetheless, I found it strange to find not even a passing reference to Thales, or to Aristotle, whom I would expect have something to say on the topic.

At this point, I decided to look in HOLLIS, to see what histories of science or histories of the science of electricity might be available.  First, I tried searching “electricity” and “history” as title words in the Expanded Search screen, but turned up very little.  I re-entered these terms, changing the search box to search only subject terms.  The first hit turned out to be the major find of this search:

• Baigrie, B. S. (2007). Electricity and magnetism: a historical perspective. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Baigrie’s book has a great introductory chapter on electricity in the ancient world, as well as a chapter on the 13th century scientist, Peter of Maricourt (sometimes known as “Peter Peregrinus”), who wrote at least one letter, and reportedly a treatise (now lost), on electricity and electromagnetism.  Much of the information that I used to erect the framework of my answer to the patron is drawn from this work.

However, Baigrie’s text was the only recent book that I found that covered the study of electricity and electromagnetism in the ancient world.  Most books, if they even made a passing reference to Thales, treated the study of electricity, and science in general, as beginning only in the early modern era.  Oftentimes, they omitted anything before the 16th century altogether. I’m not sure why this is so, but it is interesting to note.

Next, I decided to search the journals Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Journal of the History of Ideas.  I ran into the same results that I did with the books: no references to the ancients, and all references beginning with the early modern era, regardless of how I manipulated the search terms “history,” “electricity,” “Ancients,” “Greeks,” “Thales,” etc.  Moving to broader search engines, like Arts & Humanities Citation Index still turned up nothing relevant.

At this point, I decided that the final stop would be Google Scholar.  Entering in “history” and “electricity” in the advanced search option, and limiting the results to Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, I turned up two very interesting results, which filled out the missing pieces:

• Benjamin, P. (1898). A history of electricity. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
• Ricker III, H. H. (2005). Magnetism of the Greek Era. The General Science Journal.

The first book was available in electronic format via Google Books, as it is out of copyright. Both gave extensive information about the various views on electricity and electromagnetism in the ancient world, some versions of which lasted well into the 19th century.  And they confirmed each other and what I had learned in Baigrie’s book, all of which triangulated my results.

Finally, I knew when to say when. At this point, I realized that I had answered the question satisfactorily.  I typed up a page of results for my patron, and sent them along.

One thing readers might want to note at the end of this post is that, even for a straightforward question such as I was given, the search become quite complicated and involved, involving a lot of trial and error to track down the requested information.  Oftentimes this happens — what appears to be a simple research question will require a good deal of searching in multiple sources.  So, the moral of the story is: don’t give up too quickly if you don’t find the information right away.  It may just require a little more digging to locate.

What do you think, readers?  Is there another way I might have answered this question?  Another source I might have considered?  Please leave your answers in the comments box…

Good morning, readers!

Yesterday, I received a very interesting question — a patron was curious to know two things:

1. Is there a way to directly import information from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote?
2. Does Harvard provide us with a connection filter for the Index as it does for the HOLLIS catalogue?

The answer to the first question is no — though it is actually fairly easy to import records from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote.  All that is required is to perform a few extra steps to make this happen.  (I’ll outline what you need to do, next.) At present, you can only directly import results from Philosopher’s Index into RefWorks.

To the second question, the answer is yes — Harvard does provide a connection filter for the Index, so you will be able to import the references you find in the Index into EndNote without having to do a lot of extra reformatting or data entry.

Here’s how to import references from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote.  I will pretend that I am looking for MW Barnes’ article, “Vulgarity,” to illustrate how to do this.

1. Login to Philosopher’s Index via HOLLIS, using your Harvard ID and PIN.
2. When you get to the Advanced Search page in Philosopher’s Index, enter “barnes” into the first row’s  first search box, and set the drop-down menu to “Author, AU =”; on the next line, enter in “vulgarity”, and set that drop-down menu to “Title, TI =”.  Click the Search button.  You should get the one result, listing the complete bibliographic information: M.W. Barnes, “Vulgarity,” Ethics 91(1), October 1980, 72-83. Check the box next to the reference.
3. Above the results, you should see a link named “Print/Save/E-mail.”  Click on that.
4. This screen should appear:
5. Set the first drop-down box to “Full Format.”  Then move down to the radio buttons next to the “Save” button, and choose the option for whatever operating system you are using.
6. Click on “Save,” and save the files as a text/notepad file to whatever location you chose.
7. Open EndNote, and open an existing library or create a new library.  (Obviously, make sure that you have EndNote installed on your computer first.)
8. Go to the File menu, and choose the “Import” option.  In the box that appears, click on the “Choose File” option and select the text/notepad file.  Then click on the “Import Option” button.  From that list, select “Philosopher’s Index (CSA).” This is the filter that Harvard provides to import references from Philosopher’s Index into EndNote such that you do not need to reformat the data or retype it all in.
9. If you do not see this option, click on the “Other Filters” option, which should be in bold typeface among the options.  Once you do that, you will get a very long alphabetical list of filters.  Scroll down this list until you see “Philosopher’s Index (CSA)” — highlight that, and click “Choose.”  This filter will now be one of your import options.
10. When you return to the Import Box, click on “Import,” at the bottom of the box, which should import the references directly.

I realize that what I’ve just outlined above may seem complicated at first, but, once you have the hang of using EndNote, it’s actually a fairly easy process to import references into the software.

I am very happy to demonstrate these steps in person, so please feel free to contact me to set up a training session.

Also, if you have other questions about using bibliographic management software, please let me know.  I’d be very happy to answer them.

Well, this post isn’t a Question of the Week per se, but it arises from a conversation that I had with a patron several days ago. In the course of our speaking about the patron’s interests, the patron mentioned one in aesthetics, and was curious to learn more about the subject.This field is one about which I know very little — though I’ve lately become intrigued by the sub-field of film as philosophy through reading Stanley Cavell and others. Hence, I should learn a bit more about the field, so that I can have a deeper understanding of the concepts and ideas being bandied about. Also, I wanted to learn what sort of basic resources might be out there, in case my patron comes back and wants to explore the topic in greater depth.

Basic Resources & Persons

So — what resources are out there?

Journals

Off of the top of my head, I mentioned to the patron that we have subscriptions to two journals in this field at Robbins:

• The British Journal of Aesthetics
• The Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism

These journals are highly respected, and cover a wide range of topics, from the plastic arts to film and other media, aesthetic perception and experience, and the like. The patron might also want to look at journals focusing on psychology or philosophy of mind for discussions of aesthetic perception, creativity, arts & the emotions, and the like.

Encyclopedias

After thinking about this topic over the last several days, I decided to follow my practice of applying Ockham’s Razor when narrowing down where to look initially for answers. I began looking in some of the most obvious places — viz., encyclopedias of philosophy.

After an hour or so of searching in their pages, I’ve found three encyclopedias that may be of help for getting a basic understanding of aesthetics:

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) has a good many entries on various aspects of aesthetics, all of which should probably be examined.
• Likewise, the entries in volume 1 of both the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and volume 1 of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2nd edition, are also very illuminating. Not only do they cover the field in general and in several aspects, but they also give a history of aesthetics.

For those who have forgotten, or for those who are new to this blog, I have written about all of these encyclopedias in an earlier post.

Philosophers

From my own study of philosophy, I know that many philosophers have been interested in aesthetics. In no particular order, one could study:

• Immanuel Kant (especially in the Critique of Judgement)
• G.W.F. Hegel
• Monroe Beardsley
• John Dewey
• Theodor W. Adorno
• Nelson Goodman
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Arthur Danto
• R.G. Collingwood
• Plato
• Aristotle (for example, in the Poetics)
• Plotinus
• St. Thomas Aquinas

There are many other figures whom one could explore, e.g., some of the 18th German philosophers such as Baumgarten, Schiller, and Herder.

In the list above, I have linked to relevant SEP articles or books that cover the various views of aesthetics of these authors — unfortunately, there are no entries on the aesthetics of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, though these are planned, according to the SEP Table of Contents.

Books

Checking the entries in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Encyclopedia of Philosophy reveals a plethora of introductory texts, broken down by historical period or sub-field. I would have to learn more about where my patron’s interests lie before making any recommendations. Also, I would direct my patron to the primary texts on aesthetics written by the philosophers above, e.g., Kant’s Critique of Judgement, or Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics.

Other Resources?

I haven’t looked for any journal articles on aesthetics, because I’m suspecting that there will likely be many. I would probably wait and see if my patron comes back to look for more information before doing a search. If so, I’d likely go to Philosopher’s Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index first, in order to generate a bibliography, then follow the links therein to Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, and other databases to troll for articles.

There are a number of Web sites on aesthetics — my patron might want to check out:

• American Society for Aesthetics
• Google’s directory of aesthetics
• Open Directory Project’s listing of online resources of aesthetics

Philosophy and Film: An Excursus

I mentioned above my own interest in film and philosophy sparked by reading Stanley Cavell and others. For those interested in this area:

• The podcast from Stephen Mulhall about which I wrote a post a few days ago — on film as philosophy — might be worth listening to.
• The online journal, Film-Philosophy, takes a Continental approach to studying film.
• SEP has an entry, “Philosophy of Film,” which also looks fascinating.
• Finally, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64(1), Winter 2006, is entirely devoted to film and philosophy. I especially enjoyed Christopher Grau’s article from this issue, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory” — you’ll need a Harvard ID and PIN to access the article.

These items are what I have come up with so far. Are there other basic resources that I might have missed and should mention?

Good morning, all!

Yesterday, I was asked about sources for background information about Plato. The patron was reading Nietzsche, and was trying to verify some of the claims that Nietzsche was making about Plato and Socrates. The patron was wondering where to look to learn more.

As our conversation unfolded, I noted that some of the traditions about Plato’s life come from Diogenes Laeritus’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers (which is available as a two-volume set in the Loeb Classical Library.) Granted that this work is not scholarly by any standard, and more often than not reports contradictory gossip and apocryphal traditions rather than history, it still remains the source of much of the tradition against which Nietzsche, as a classical philologist, railed.

Another reference source that I mentioned to the patron is Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, edited by Jacques Brunschwig and G.E.R. Lloyd. There is a decent overview of Plato, his life, and his work in this book, which might be of use in assessing Nietzsche’s claims.

Finally, we moved into a discussion of the dramatic dating of the dialogs, such as the Parmenides, where an elderly Parmenides interacts with Socrates and a very young Aristotle. The patron was curious about the dramatic dates of the dialogs, and wondered if there was a chronology of the dialogs in terms of when they supposedly took place. As it turns out, there is such a chronology: Debra Nails’ The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics contains a listing of the dialogs in terms of their dramatic dates, along with a list of dramatis personae for each dialog.

The patron was satisfied with these sources, and looked forward to returning to examine these works in greater depth.

One book that I might have mentioned, but did not remember at the time, is Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpretations of Plato, by Drew Hyland. Many of Nietzsche’s interpretations of Plato, Platonism, and Socrates found their way into 20th-century Continental thought, especially through Heidegger and his intellectual heirs. Hyland’s book is a lucid and provocative challenge to these various interpretations; additionally his introduction provides, in my view, a brilliant overview of how to read and understand the complexity that is a Platonic dialog.

Certainly, there are many, many more resources out there that I might have found for my patron. But, the request was only for a few sources at the present time.

Are there some that I might have missed?

Good afternoon! A few days ago, I received a request from a patron who was doing some research on Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality. The patron was looking for histories of psychology, especially of psychology in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom, in order to get a better sense of the context in which Brentano developed this concept. One of the items that the patron was already looking at was E.G. Boring’s The History of Empirical Psychology, along with two articles that were found via Philosopher’s Index. What the patron was looking for were additional books and/or articles outlining the history of psychology. How did I go about looking for these items? Well, let’s follow the guidelines that I presented in an earlier post.

Define the Question.

What is the patron looking for? Histories of psychology, especially those that give the context of the times in which Brentano was developing his ideas.

Setting Up Searches: Apply Ockham’s Razor

Where is the obvious place to find information of this sort? The patron has already looked in Philosopher’s Index, so I don’t need to look at this again. Given that this question crosses both psychology and philosophy, the Social Sciences Citation Index (sister database to Arts & Humanities Citation Index) seems like a good place to begin. So, that’s where I went to look for articles. I also knew that the American Psychological Association publishes several histories of psychology in the United States, and I went there once I was finished searching in the Social Sciences Citation Index.

Setting Up Searches: “How” is more important than “where”

Once inside the Social Sciences Citation Index, I chose the Advanced Search option, and initially chose to set my search to look for TS=history AND TS=psychology AND TS=Germany, limiting the results to articles in English only. I returned 17 hits, of which three were especially relevant:

• Andreas Mayer, “Lost Objects: From the Laboratories of Hypnosis to the Psychoanalytic Setting,” Science in Context 19(1), 37–64 (2006).
• Lothar Sprung and Helga Sprung, “History of modern psychology in Germany in 19th- and 20th-century thought and society,” International Journal of Psychology, 2001, 36 (6), 364–376
• Manuel Stoffers, “Münsterberg’s Nightmare: Psychology and History in Fin-De-Siècle Germany and America,” Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 163–182 Spring 2003

Furthermore, the Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences might also be a good place for my patron to do some further exploring.

I repeated the same search for the US, replacing “United States” for “Germany.” This returned 55 hits, although all of these were irrelevant, discussing only individual treatments or the rise of the Boulder model of training clinical psychologists. Seeing this, I turned to the APA’s publications, to see what they had to offer. Three books jumped out at me right away:

• Aspects of the History of Psychology in America: 1892–1992, Edited by Helmut E. Adler and Robert W. Rieber
• Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology, Edited by Wade E. Pickren, PhD and Donald A. Dewsbury, PhD
• Psychology: Theoretical-Historical Perspectives, Second Edition, Edited by Robert W. Rieber and Kurt Salzinger

Also, I decided to look at the APA’s Divisions, and found that Division 26, the Society for the History of Psychology, publishes a journal, History of Psychology, which might be relevant for my patron. (Also of use might be Division 24, The Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology.)

Finally, I repeated the search for information about the history of psychology in the United Kingdom. For that, I replaced “united states” with “TS=(united kingdom OR britain).” This search returned 17 hits — like the search for the US, most of these were irrelevant, although one article did list a number of histories of psychology in the UK:

• Graham Richards, “The History of Psychology in Britain and the Founding of “The Centre for the History of Psychology,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 35(1), 41–46 Winter 1999

That’s what I was able to find using one database and a Web site. However, never underestimate the power of serendipitous finds. While doing a quick Google search to locate information about the Boring text that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I stumbled over two extensive online bibliographies of the history of psychology, created by Paul Ballantyne, of York University, Canada.

• http://www.comnet.ca/%7Epballan/histpsycbib.htm
• http://www.comnet.ca/~pballan/Historiog1.htm

It’s an example of how Google can be used as an adjunct to other resources, even accidentally.

Triangulate Your Results

While I returned a fair number of relevant materials, I was a bit uncomfortable with the paucity of items covering the US and the UK. So, I decided to run the same searches in PsycINFO, which, hosted by EBSCO, is similar in format to Academic Search Premier. Using the same terms as I used above, I returned the same articles that I had found via the Social Sciences Citation Index, and more, though these all were as irrelevant as the ones I had viewed earlier. So, I was confident that I had found what I was looking for, and let the patron know.

Know When to Say When
With all of this information, my patron should have more than enough to assist with answering the original question. I’ve given quite a bit of material here, and any more would likely be overwhelming. Hence, it’s probably good to stop here.

A most interesting question, which generated some interesting answers.

Any thoughts on how you might have run this search differently?

Good morning! The Question of the Week stems from a recent request. A patron was interested in finding biographical information about the philosophers mentioned in a course, and wanted suggestions on where to look.

A few thoughts on where to look come to mind:

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  

These three will probably give one good basic biographical information about most major philosophers.

There are also several good histories of philosophy, which I’ve written about earlier, and which I’ve posted, that might be of help.

More in-depth biographies can be of help, but one should evaluate them carefully. Biographers have their slants and biases, so you may not necessarily get a complete picture of a philosopher from reading one text. For example, consider St. Augustine. Garry Wills’ short biography is okay for a general popular overview, but it does contain at least one factual error (confusing the Stoics with the Cynics, towards the end of the book), and there have been questions about his portrayal of Augustine. Likewise, James O’Donnell’s biography has received mixed reviews. Peter Brown’s biography is generally regarded as the best biography of St. Augustine, thought it is a long, scholarly tome. Does this mean that one shouldn’t read Wills or O’Donnell? Not at all. All this means is that the reader should peruse the texts critically, nothing more. In fact, reading all three texts is probably the best way to to go.

In unrelated news, Harvard has finally gotten access to the database, POIESIS. This database includes current issues of journals such as Philosophical Topics, The Journal of Philosophy, and the like. There are some bugs still being worked out in regards to printing documents. Once these have been resolved, I’ll write up a post about POIESIS.

Good afternoon! This week’s Question of the Week comes from a patron who is wondering if you “have” to go through HOLLIS to log into a database. The simple answer is no, surprisingly. If you have the LibX plugin installed on the Firefox browser, you can simply right-click on the screen, go to the last option, which will say “”Reload [x resource] via Harvard access,” and click on that. You’ll be asked for your Harvard ID and PIN; login with these, and you should go right to the item for which you’re looking. More information about LibX can be found here.

Another way might be through Google Scholar. Here’s how I tried it:

My patron is looking for Simon Prosser’s article, “The Two-Dimensional Contents of Consciousness,” which is to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal, Philosophical Studies. A pre-print electronic copy is available from SpringerLink, and the patron wanted to know how to access this copy via the link on Prosser’s Web site, which goes directly to the SpringerLink page. Given this information, I tried the following:

1. Go to the HOLLIS search page. You won’t need to do an expanded search here; simply set the Search Type to “Title beginning with…” and enter in “google scholar.” Run the search, and go to the second or the third result in the list (these are both the same entry.) Click on the link in the record, and log in with your PIN and ID.
2. In the Google Scholar search box, I entered in ‘prosser “the two-dimensional contents of consciousness”,’ and ran the search. I returned no results.
3. Going back to the main search screen, I clicked on the link “Advanced Scholar Search.” In that screen, I did the following:
   1. Entered the title (between quotation marks), “the two-dimensional contents of consciousness” in the box “with the exact phrase“.
   2. Entered “prosser” in the “Return articles written by” box.
   3. Set the search to look for articles only in Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities
4. I still returned no hits.
5. Oddly enough, if you leave the search as it is in 3., and add in “prosser” to the “with the exact phrase” box along with the title, you turn up two results. The first has two versions: one is the draft of the article from Prosser’s Web site, and the second is the finalized article that will be coming out in Philosophical Studies, which is also on Prosser’s Web site. I’m not sure why the search works this way, and not the other ways, but, it seems to be one of the quirks of Google Scholar.

Please let me know if you have questions or comments about this search. Keep those questions coming!

Good morning! The Question of the Week came from some research that I’m doing for my class, Emotions (PSYC E-1060), offered through the Extension School.

In this week’s session, our professor mentioned that very little empirical research has been done on the emotions sadness and love. In passing, he mentioned an article that argued for love being a basic emotion (along with anger, fear, happiness, and the like), giving only the title of the article. My interest was piqued, and I wanted to read the article. Would I be able to find it with only the minimal information that I had been given?

The answer is yes. Even with very little information, you can locate an article, book, or other item. I’ll outline how I originally found the article, and also look at two other options that I might have used, for comparison. I’ll demonstrate this by using some of the steps I’ve outlined in my searching guidelines.

Define the Question.

What am I looking for? I want to read an article titled, “Is Love a ‘Basic’ Emotion?” — this is all the information that I have at present. Basically, I need to get the bibliographic information for the article first, and then see if it is available electronically.

Setting Up Searches.

It appears that my search may be difficult, given how little information I have at present. However, I am not as limited as might have originally thought — I do have one other potential clue. In his lectures, my professor often cites articles and data on emotion written by sociologists and anthropologists. This bit of information leads me to suspect that the article may not necessarily be an article from a psychology journal, but from a journal in a related social sciences discipline. Thus, when I start to do much search, this clue will guide me in my choice of databases.

Apply Ockham’s Razor

As I noted above, I need to get bibliographic information. I have the title of the article, and I’m guessing that it is in a social sciences journal of some kind, most likely psychology, sociology, or anthropology. So, based on this, there are three citation databases that are likely places for me to begin:

• PsycARTICLES — the HOLLIS record notes that the database “[p]rovides full text access to articles from journals published by APA and allied organizations since 1988. Covers general psychology and specialized basic, applied, clinical, and theoretical research in psychology.”
• PsycINFO — the HOLLIS record notes that the database “[c]ontains citations for materials in psychology and psychiatry indexed by the American Psychological Association from more than 1300 journals, books, dissertations, and reports.”
• Social Sciences Citation Index – This is the sister database to Arts & Humanities Citation Index, focusing (obviously!) on the social sciences.

Since the article I’m looking for may not be from a psychology journal, my initial though is to begin looking in the Social Sciences Citation Index. I could try the other two databases next, if I don’t locate the article in the Index.

Running the Search

Here is how I initially ran the search:

1. Go to HOLLIS, and select the Digital Resources tab. Set the search to “Title beginning with…” and enter in the terms “social sciences citation index.” Click on search.
2. Scroll down to “Social sciences citation index (Online).” Click on that, and log in via the link in the record.
3. When you get to the Index’s home page, you will have several options from which to choose. My original choice was to go to the Advanced Search, not for any particular reason, but because it is the option with which I am most comfortable. Could I have used the Cited Ref Search? Actually, no — checking this option now, I see that, since all I have is the title, I lack any of the information that the Cited Ref Search needs, like the author, title of the source, or the year. So, my choice of Advanced Search was correct, though not for any specific reason.
4. Remember that the search functionality in Social Sciences Citation Index is exactly the same as it is for Arts & Humanities Citation Index, so if you’ve read my post on this database, the set-up of this search will be familiar to you. On the Advanced Search page, I will do the following:
   1. Make sure that the search is set only to search the Social Sciences Citation Index at present. The article may be included in the other two databases, but, let’s see what we turn up with this database before adding the others in. As I’ve said, it’s often easier to start with a smaller search, then broaden out, than vice versa.
   2. I don’t know what year the article was published, so I will set the search to look in all years.
   3. Since I know the title, I’ll set up my search in the following way: TI=love AND TI=basic.
   4. Finally, I’ll restrict the search to English-only and to look only for articles.
5. Running the search, I return three hits. Clicking on the “3″ in the Search History box towards the bottom of the page, I see that the second article gives the following bibliographic information:
   • Title: Is love a ”basic” emotion?
   • Author(s): Shaver PR, Morgan HJ, Wu S
   • Source: PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS 3 (1): 81-96 MAR 1996
   • Document Type: Article
   • Language: English
6. This does indeed look like the article that I want, especially after reading the abstract. So, I locate an electronic copy via the button, and begin to skim it.

Triangulate Your Results

Is this the article that I wanted? As I peruse the article, I notice the sections that my professor had quoted in class, so I now know that I have located what I wanted. I can also contact the professor to confirm, or see if he posts the article on the course Web site. Finally, I might try a search in either PsycARTICLES or PsycINFO, to see I can locate the article as well there — which, incidentally, it is listed in the later database, but not in the former.

Summary

In short, you don’t need a lot of information to locate an article, journal, book or other item. Even with only one or two clues, and a thoughtful search set-up, you can find what you need.

Good morning! The Question of the Week comes from a request that I received yesterday. A patron was looking for help in locating German editions of Freud’s work using HOLLIS. Turning up far too many references to Freud’s works in a variety of languages, the patron wanted to know if there was a way to tweak the HOLLIS search engine so as to find only German editions.

The short answer to the question is yes — but I’d like to show you the full extent of how we went about answering the question, because it illustrates a.) how print and electronic resources can be used in combination to answer a research question and b.) how searching, though often done imperfectly, can yield results.

How we did the search

When the patron came to me and asked the question, I said that, yes, there was a way to set HOLLIS to search only for German-language books. Here’s how:

• Go to the main HOLLIS page, and click on “Expanded Search”
• On the new search screen, set the first search box to search “Author words,” and enter in “freud” for the search term.
• Below the search box, in the “Limit Search to” section, go to the “Language” box, and scroll down until you get to “German.” Click on that.
• Now, run the search — you get 351 results, which is still a lot to sort through.

At this point, the patron indicated that the required text being sought after was a German edition of the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, though he could not recall the German title offhand. Looking for this particular text is an important bit of information. Why? Because if we can find the German title, and add one of the words into the HOLLIS search engine as a limiter, we’ll be able to cut down the number of results to a more manageable level. This goes to show why it’s important to define your search clearly right from the beginning, because it can save you time and effort when searching.

I didn’t know the German title either, so I did a quick Google search (using “freud” and “bibliography”) to see if there was an online bibliography that gave the German title. I didn’t find one right away, turning up only English-language bibliographies. But, then, I thought — might not the Standard Edition (SE) of Freud’s work, in print format, list the title? It was worth a look, at the very least. So, I went to Volume 24, which contains all of the Indexes to Freud’s work. I found the title in English, and then remembered that the SE lists the German title at the head of each work. Locating on the first page of Part I of the Introductory Lectures, in Volume 15, I found the German title — Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse — and returned to HOLLIS to re-run the search.

As above, we’ll do the same search, but with the following change:

• Go to the main HOLLIS page, and click on “Expanded Search”
• On the new search screen, set the first search box to search “Author words,” and enter in “freud” for the search term. In the second box, set the search to look for “Title words,” and enter in “vorlesungen.”
• Below the search box, in the “Limit Search to” section, go to the “Language” box, and scroll down until you get to “German.” Click on that.
• Now, run the search — you get 36 results, which is far more manageable than 351.

Scrolling down the list, the eighth item on the list is the edition that the patron was looking for. I printed off the record, with the call number, so that the patron could retrieve the book at his convenience.

Summary

Was this necessarily the best way, or the only way, to answer the question? Not at all. I thought of a few others ways that I might have answered the search differently afterwards:

• What I should have done up front was to have gathered more information from the patron when he made his initial request, to clarify exactly what he was looking for.
• When I did the Google search to locate a bibliography of Freud’s work, I might have used the advanced Google search, limiting the results to German-language sites, or added “german” to my search terms, to obtain better results.
• I might also have checked the New York Freudian Society or the Freud Archives, to see if they had a listing of the German title.
• I probably should have added another German title word in to the revised search, to narrow the search down a little further.

You may even think of other ways we might have run the search. Feel free to add them in to the comments section of this page, or e-mail them to me, and I’ll add them to a future post.

All this shows is that searching is an imperfect thing, as much an art as it is a science. In the hurly-burly of the moment, you may not always think of the best way to find what you’re looking for, which is why asking another person for input and perspective on a question is usually a good idea, as I’ve noted elsewhere. It’s also a good idea to review a search after you’ve done, to consider if there might be other ways that you could have answered it.

It also shows that you can, and sometimes must, use print and electronic resources in combination with each other to answer a research question. On their own, each medium is fine and with its own worth and value, but when used in combination, print and electronic resources can expand your research greatly.

So, that’s this week’s Question of the Week. If you have questions or comments, please feel free to send them along to me.

Good afternoon! I’m back from my trip, and ready to blog.

Today’s post comes from a request from a reader, who wants to learn how to access Jeffrey King’s book, The Nature and Structure of Content, via Oxford Scholarship Online.*

What I will do in this post is describe how I go about searching to see if Harvard has access to the book, and to Oxford Scholarship Online. I want to show how searching is often a matter of trial and error, and is not guaranteed to always be successful. I’ll go through each of the guidelines that I outlined in Searching 101: Basic Guidelines, to show how a “real” search (versus a “canned” search that I pull out of my head) works. So, let’s begin…

Define the Question

What is the question being asked? The reader is asking how to access the electronic edition of a particular book that resides in a particular database.

Setting Up Searches: Apply Ockham’s Razor

Since we have been given the database (Oxford Scholarship Online), let’s see if we can locate that first by using HOLLIS’ Digital Resources search screen. Why? We know that it’s a digital resource, and we know that the most obvious place to find these tools is by using the screen.

Setting Up Searches: “How” is often more important than “where”

Going to the main HOLLIS page, I select the “Digital Resources” tab. On the next page, I set the “Search Type” to search “Keywords anywhere,” and enter in “oxford scholarship.” Why? My hunch is that these two terms as keywords should be sufficient to return the database I’m looking for. My results? Two irrelevant hits, both of which have “oxford” and “scholarship” in the records, but not near each other.

Was I wrong to follow my hunch? In this case, yes. So, back to the Digital Resources tab. This time, I’ll set the “Search Type” to search “Title beginning with,” but leave the two search terms the same. This time, I get a list of some very interesting sources, including the satirical piece, The Oxford Sausage, written by Phanuel Bacon. (He must have been a real ham.)

Setting Up Searches: Searching is often a matter of trial and error

Now I am starting to get a little suspicious. The two-word phrase, searched as “Title beginning with,” should have located the database. Where might we go next?

Another possibility would be to search the “E-research” page, which you can access via the Harvard Libraries home page. Go to http://lib.harvard.edu; on the horizontal red menu bar in the upper left-hand corner of the page, click on the “E-Research” button, then select “Find E-resources” in the drop-down menu. When you get to the home page, make sure to log in, using your Harvard ID and PIN — this will allow you to immediately search the databases without having to go back through HOLLIS and login via the proxy server.

In the “Title” tab, set the search to search the terms “oxford scholarship” in “Starts with.” Click on search. You’ll get a list of results beginning with the letters “pa,” which suggests that these are the closest items to the search terms. Hit the back button on your browser, and remove the word”scholarship” from the search terms, leaving everything else the same. Click on go, and look at the results. You’ll see a list of items beginning with “oxford.” Scrolling through the list, and going on to the second page, you see that there are no listings for “Oxford Scholarship Online.” The closest item is “Oxford Reference Online: Religion and Philosophy,” which, if you click on it, takes you to several reference works, but not to the full text that you’re looking for.

Triangulate your results

At this point, it doesn’t look like Harvard subscribes to Oxford Scholarship Online. However, we need not give up just yet. Perhaps the database is not cataloged in HOLLIS as “Oxford Scholarship Online.” Since the database contains electronic versions of texts, it may be the case that the electronic texts are cataloged individually, with a link to the e-version. Let’s see if searching this way turns anything up.

Go back to the main HOLLIS search page and click on the “Full Catalog” page. Set the search to “Expanded Search,” and enter in the following terms:

• Set the first search box to “Author words” and enter in “king”
• Set the second search box to “Title words” and enter in “content”
• In the area below the search boxes, the “Limit Search to” area, set the “Format” to “Digital” — this is the format under which the HCL catalogers classify electronic books.

Run your search… and you get a record for a document produced during the Restoration by Charles II of England. So, back to our searching. This time, thinking that content might be too general a word, and might lead to our turning up Charles II’s document again, let’s reset the search to the following:

• Set the first search box to “Author words” and enter in “king”
• Set the second search box to “Title words” and enter in “structure”
• In the area below the search boxes, the “Limit Search to” area, set the “Format” to “Networked Resource” — this is sometimes a synonym for the “Digital” format.

Does this work? Unfortunately, no. We get no hits from this search, which probably means that our search is too limited. So, let’s try the search this way:

• Set the first search box to “Author words” and enter in “king”
• Set the second search box to “Title words” and enter in “structure”
• Do not set any other limiters to the search.

Run the search, and a list of 37 items comes up. Notice that there are six headers at the top of the list: # (number in the list), Author, Title, Year, Format, and Links. The “Links” column is usually where the link to the electronic version is placed. Since there isn’t one there for our book, which is first in the list, it’s becoming more certain that Harvard doesn’t have access to an electronic text at present. Click on the record link. Looking at the full record, you don’t see a link listed.

So, given that we didn’t find Oxford Scholarship Online using the HOLLIS Digital Resources search and the E-resources page, and given that there is no link in the HOLLIS record for the book, it’s a good bet that, at present, we do not have access to the database.

Ask, Ask, Ask!

At this point, I might contact some of my HCL colleagues, who are in charge of purchasing subscriptions to electronic resources, to see if they can shed some light on the topic. I also might ask a colleague who works in reference to see if they have a different perspective.

Know When to Say When

To recapitulate:

• We checked HOLLIS’ records, using the Digital Resources search screen, but turned up nothing.
• We checked the E-resources page, but turned up nothing
• We checked HOLLIS’ records, using the Full Catalog search screen. We located the book, but found that we do not have access to an electronic version at present.

Can we do anything else? Other than investigating as to whether or not Harvard has institutional access to Oxford Scholarship Online, there isn’t much else we can do. One could get a personal account to the database, though the cost is likely to be very high, especially if one is interested in looking only at one or two chapters of a book. So, for now, we can say that we’ve done what we can to answer this question.

Few Searches are Perfect

As I noted, few searches are done perfectly, and sometimes when you search, you turn up a dead-end, or find that what you want is not currently available.

Summary

In conclusion, this is how I would answer the question of how to locate an electronic text in the database, Oxford Scholarship Online. I found that Harvard does not appear to subscribe to this database at present, nor is there an alternative electronic text available at present.

Hopefully, this post illustrates how one goes about searching. It’s unfortunate that we don’t have access to Oxford Scholarship Online at present, so that I could show the requestor how to use the database.

Please feel free to send me more questions! And, if you have suggestions as to how I can better answer questions, or how I might have done a search differently, please let me know.

Update (8/31/2007): Make sure to check out the first comment to this post. The poster offers another way to run this search, which is a bit simpler than the one I’ve outlined above. It also illustrates how there can be multiple ways to run a search, all of which lead to the same answer.

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*For those who don’t know, Oxford Scholarship Online is “a cross-searchable library containing the full text of over 1,350 Oxford books in the areas of Economics and Finance, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion. Specially-commissioned abstracts and keywords are available at book and chapter level, and up to 200 new and recently-published books are added each year.”

Also, Harvard does not subscribe to the complete set of Oxford online materials, as it is very expensive, to the tune of several tens of thousands of dollars per year. Copyright fees and the desire to boost revenues are the major reasons for the steep price.