Library Knowledge Base Doing a focused subject search

for Books

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Table of ContentsIntroduction...........................................................................................................................................3

Subject headings in the Library catalogue.............................................................................................3

How to search by subject......................................................................................................................3

Need more help?...................................................................................................................................6

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Introduction

If you want to retrieve all the most helpful books on your research topic which the Library holds, then you should try searching the Library catalogue by subject heading. This guide will explain how to go about this.

Subject headings in the Library catalogue

The library catalogue is the detailed bibliographic listing of all the items found within the library, either physically or electronically. This catalogue is organized and indexed so that you can search by a variety of fields. At Glasgow you can search the catalogue for books by choosing the ‘Books’ link under the ‘Specific search’ options in the maroon box on the Library homepage.

When the bibliographic record for each new book or e-book acquired by the Library is created, the cataloguer selects and assigns appropriate subject headings as part of the record to describe the main research themes which that book is adjudged to cover. These headings conform to a controlled indexing language which has a standard format to ensure that the same descriptor, or keyword sequence, is always used in every record to describe the same topic.

You can benefit from this by establishing what descriptors the Library catalogue typically uses to describe books on your particular research topic, and then retrieving records for all the books indexed under those terms in the Library, so you can make an appropriate selection from the texts available to you.

How to search by subject

As an example, it is a common student assignment in Scottish Literature or the Visual Arts to be asked to discuss the ‘Scottishness’ of a particular novel or painting. So if you input: ‘Scottishness’ as a keyword search term on the ‘Books’ link from the specific search box on the Library home page, you get the following first entry in your results:

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If you open up the record for that book, which is clearly on topic, you get:

At the bottom of the entry you can see that the usual subject heading, or descriptor, in the catalogue for the created word ‘Scottishness’ must therefore be: ‘National characteristics, Scottish’. If you click on that line to activate that phrase as a keyword search, then from there use the link to ‘Advanced Search’ under the search box at the top of the page to select ‘Subject’ rather than ‘Keyword’ from the pull-down box, you have the following screen:

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So by implementing that search you can then retrieve all entries in the catalogue which use the ‘National characteristics, Scottish’ subject line:

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You will see that this specific focussed subject line search by descriptor retrieves 122 books from which to select appropriate titles, as opposed to the eight retrieved by your original free keyword search on: ‘Scottishness’, only two of which were relevant to your needs.

Need more help?

Contact your College Librarian for more help with subject searching - http://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/help/collegelibrarians/.

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