Database Fun

A "citation pearl growing" approach was used in a search for information on whaling activities by Japan. JSTOR was the database, and the search commenced with the keyword "whaling." Facing 2100 hits, "japan" was added, and then "scientific." This cut the field down to the hundreds. One article on tracing genetic structures of whale products suggested the term "population decline," the addition of which produced a manageable 23 hits, the first few of which are shown above.

Above, you'll see an example of a the results of a "successive fraction" search using WorldCat.

In this case, I am looking for recordings of Choctaw Indian songs, sung in Choctaw; I began by specifying the keyword "Choctaw" and "sound recording" as the type of material. This produced 150 hits. I then limited those results to non-juvenile audience, and this pared the field down to 88. I then used WorldCat's "Limit" button to limit by subject; from the list generated by the database, I was given the results shown above.

Dialog was used to demonstrate a building block search. This, after all, seems to be what it was built for. The search query used was


















Example 1. Screen shot of building block search in DIALOG

The first screen shot, above, shows the first and second building blocks for the search of DIALOG and their combination. The first, photograph? and collection?, returned thousands of hits for the individual words, but 673 for the pair--a helpful start. The second block, digit? and preserv? again returned thousands for the individual words, but 426 for the pair. Combining the two returned an entirely manageable 10 hits, shown in example 2, below--and several of these applied to the matter at hand, the digitization and preservation of photographic collections.























Example 2. Final Hits page from DIALOG.

The final search, a browsing search in Books in Print, began with KW: photography" and "KS: history" returning 1953 hits. Browsing the first 10 revealed one that pointed me in the direction I wanted to go: Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums has, as one of its Bowker subjects "Photography in Historiography."


Example 5. Initial browsing search of BIP.

Following the trail of this subject gets me the 17 hits on the page headed with the selections shown in example 6.

Example 6. Hits from browsing search in BIP.