Competency 6-Building Block Strategy

I decided to search the database LexisNexis Academic for my second database competency requirement. The search strategy I chose was the Building Block construction. My topic is "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians?" As in my previous search, I first constructed my facets.
s1= law librarian*
s2= education* or degree* or training*
s3= skill* or abilit* or competenc*

In the Lexis database, I chose to search the "Legal Library," under the "Legal" tab. Within this library, I chose to search the database titled "Law Reviews," and under sources I chose "US Law Reviews and Journals Combined."

I combined my 3 identified component facets with the Boolean operator "and" to have a search query of :
(law librarian*) and (education* or degree* or training*) and (skill* or abilit* or competenc*)

I retrieved 1,141 results:


I narrowed this set by limiting results to articles published after January 2005. This gave me 315 results. I decided this was still a bit unwieldy so I tried adding another facet to my search.
s4= (job* or profession* or employment)

This brought my results to 263 hits. I now decided to revise one of my facets. I changed s2 (education* or degree* or training) to s2= (MLS or JD or training). My new search gave me 178 results. This was still a bit large and could probably be narrowed further by employing new synonyms or another facet, or perhaps by searching only within certain publications. However, at this point, I began to scan through some of the retrieved articles. Some were false hits, but many were very relevant to my topic. Here is one:


This article by G. Edward White titled, "Law Librarians," discusses how the role of the law librarian has changed over the years and the need today for a person to have sophisticated skills and knowledge to work as a law librarian. It is extremely relevant to my topic. I found a great number of other relevant articles discussing such things as the administrative and other skills needed to become law library directors, skills and education sought by those hiring academic law librarians, the role of technology in future law librarianship, and potential new opportunities for law librarians like those in evidence-based librarianship. Here is one more from my set of 178 that I found to be pertinent to my topic:

This is the article about skills and education sought by those hiring academic law librarians. It is titled, "Choosing the Top Candidate: Best Practices in Academic Law Library Hiring," by Wheeler, Johnson and Manion.

I found this database to be a little more difficult to search initially. It did not seem to be as intuitive as some of the others that I have been exploring. I also found the Building Block strategy to be easy to understand and use, but I think I will have more productive searches when I improve my ability to craft the components of my facets. I can see that it is important to think of many possible terms, and then choose the best. I did find that by looking at the retrieved articles, some new terms were suggested to me. For example, the term "knowledge" could be used in the facet with skill* or abilit* or *competenc*. I understood the LexisNexis database better as I explored further. My results had initially been grouped by publication date, but I re-sorted the list by relevance and this helped in identifying the best retrieved documents. Overall, I think this database is an excellent resource. I was very happy with my results and believe that I will have even better success in the future with both this database and the Building Block strategy when I have had more practice. I am pleased to have found a number of good, new sources relevant to my topic area of interest, "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians today?"