Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Successive Fractions search in Project Muse

Thesis for the paper that I am working on:

Theoretical models and demographic data reveal that human information seeking habits remain generally the same regardless of the interface in which information is sought

At this point I am specifically looking for information on the information seeking behaviors of people using digital information sources.

Facets:
Information seeking behaviors
Digital information sources

I browsed the subject headings in Project Muse to identify subject terms. I didn't find many relevant subject headings, so I did a preliminary search on each one to see how many records each one retrieved by itself to identify the broadest term.

Subject Headings search (articles only):
Internet 166
Information behavior 20
Electronic information resource* 30
Electronic journals 12
Online bibliographic searching 4
World Wide Web (Information retrieval system) 4
Online library catalogs 8
Online information services 3

Successive Fractions search (all searches were in Subjects Headings field and limited to Articles only:

S1: (Internet) = 166 hits

The results were too broad, so I added another term. I chose Information behavior because Electronic information resource* could be considered a synonym for Internet.

S2: (Internet) and (Information behavior) = 4 hits

The second search didn't return many results, but I immediately found a useful article.

Dresang, Eliza T. (2005). Access: The information-seeking behavior of youth in the digital environment. Library Trends 54(2), 178-196.

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