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Searching and Finding Information Sources

Prof. Dr. Khalid MahmoodDepartment of Library & Information Science

University of the PunjabLahore, PAKISTAN

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Start searching

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Start searching

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Finding information sources

Formal ways University libraries Special libraries and government

departments Inter-library loan

Informal ways Authors Personal libraries of experts Your friends

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Bibliographic aids

Library catalog Indexing journal Abstracting journal Bibliography Bibliographic database People

Experts Librarians

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Library card catalog

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Library classification (DDC)000 Computer science, information & general

works100 Philosophy & psychology200 Religion300 Social sciences400 Language500 Science600 Technology700 Arts & recreation800 Literature900 History & geography

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DDC – 300 – Social sciences300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology310 Statistics320 Political science330 Economics340 Law350 Public administration & military science360 Social problems & social services370 Education380 Commerce, communications & transportation390 Customs, etiquette & folklore

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DDC – 330 – Economics330 Economics331 Labor economics332 Financial economics333 Economics of land & energy334 Cooperatives335 Socialism & related systems336 Public finance337 International economics338 Production339 Macroeconomics & related topics

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Online Searching Techniques

Boolean Operators Phrase Searching Truncation / Wildcard Searching Proximity Searching Focusing / Limiting a Search

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Boolean Operators

AND

OR

NOT

Boolean operators allow you to join terms together, widen a search or exclude terms from your search results. This means you can be more precise in locating your information.

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Boolean Operators at Emerald

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Phrase Searching

It narrows your search down by searching for an exact phrase or sentence. It is particularly useful when searching for a title or a quotation. Usually quotation marks are used to connect the words together.

For example“Towards a healthier Scotland”

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Truncation / WildcardThese search techniques retrieve information on

similar words by replacing part of the word with a symbol usually a * or ?. However, different databases use different symbols, so check what is used.

In truncation the end of the word is replaced. For example physiother* will retrieve physiotherapy,

physiotherapeutic, physiotherapist and so on. In wildcard searching, letters from inside the word

are replaced. For example wom*n will retrieve the terms woman and

women.

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Proximity Searching

It looks for documents where two or more separately matching term occurrences are within a specified distance, where distance is the number of intermediate words or characters

For example Term A NEAR Term B Term A ADJ Term B

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Focusing / Limiting a SearchThere are many ways to focus your search and

all search tools offer different ways of doing this. Some of the ways of limiting your search are as follows:

Date Language Place Publication type Age groups Type of material e.g. you could just need to

find case studies

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General Search Engines

Google Yahoo AltaVista FAST Search MSN Search Lycos Excite

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Google Simple Search

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Google Advanced Search

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Scholarly Search Engines

Google Scholar Infomine Librarians’ Internet Index Intute Pinakes Business Research ISI Web of Science

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Librarians’ Internet Index

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Subject DirectoriesAlso called Information Gateways and Virtual Libraries Yahoo Directory Librarians’ Internet Index About.com Infomine The WWW Virtual Library Specialized Subject Directories

Abi Logic Solid Crawler Academic Info SOSIG - Social Science Information Gateway

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Yahoo Directory

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Electronic Theses and Dissertations - ETDs

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Catalog of theses and doctoral dissertations

contributed by some 176 universities and 27 institutions worldwide

British Library EThOS 250,000+ theses of British universities Many are free

Proquest Dissertations & Theses Database World’s most comprehensive collection of

dissertations and theses with over 2.7 million titles

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Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

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Online Databases

Bibliographic databases ERIC, Agricola, Medline, EconLit,

PsychINFO Numeric databases

Stat-USA, UN Common Database Full text databases

ScienceDirect, Emerald, JSTOR

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ERIC Database

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Science Direct Database

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Free e-books Libgen.info

800,000+ books The Online Books Page

1,000,000+ books Project Gutenberg

40,000+ books Internet Public Library

20,000+ books

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HEC – Online Resources National Digital Library

Over 30 databases with over 23,000 journals

Accessible by 250 institutions in Pakistan 50,000 e-books Links to open access resources

Pakistan Research Repository Full text of over 6,500 Pakistani doctoral

theses

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HEC – Digital Library

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Pakistan Research Repository

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Library Web OPACs Libdex

Worldwide index of library catalogs WorldCat

2 billion items from 72,000 libraries worldwide

Library of Congress The British Library National Library of Pakistan