Week 4 Lesson 7 - - WorldCat and More FirstSearch Indexes

There are several options in the search boxes other than the usual keyword, author, title, subject and series.  Using any one of these would be helpful, but WorldCat breaks it down even further by including search criteria such as publisher, access method, ISBN, musical composition, and more.  You are also able to type in up to three search criteria at a time.  By searching the subject of Martin Luther, limiting the language to English, limiting the type of materials to books, and setting the subtype limits to nonfiction, I would have a better chance of finding more detailed information for my patron.   Even by using these limits, I came up with 36,911 results.  The site gave recommendations at the top on how to limit my search even further.  It gave more choices to limit by author, subject heading, year, document type, and number of libraries.  I chose to go back and search from the beginning with these limiters and included the keywords “juvenile” and “religion” since this search was for a 4^th and 5^th grade Sunday School teacher.  I would recommend the book “Martin Luther : The Great Reformer” by W Norman Pittenger, and “Matin Luther” by Samuel Willard Crompton. Although the book “Martin Luther:  The Great Reformter” quite a few less libraries to choose from, the nearest libraries for both books were in Minnesota.

By typing in Graphic Novels for a keyword search, you can get several different options including ones with just “graphic” in their description, so I added more limiters including juvenile under the subtype limits, books under the limit type to and English as the language.  I also included “Classic Literature” as part of the search.  I would add several of the classics as graphic novels, but the one that I chose was “The Hobbit : an illustrated edition of the fantasy classic.  The publisher is Ballentine Books out of New York, NY.

I typed in “My Fair Lady” and chose musical composition as the limiter and then under the section of limit type to I clicked on “musical scores”.   There were no records for this search, so I went back and typed My Fair Lady as the keyword and still used the “musical scores” as the limit type.  This time I was given 1,897 results, but the results included any that had the words my, fair, and lady in them because I forgot the quotation marks.  Finally I was able to find 866 results and the one that I chose had OCLC: 26429906 as the Accession number.

After checking out some of the other blogs, I noticed that there are no right answers.  Each person used different language, limiters, and search tools yet we all came up with useful information and found resources that we could use.