Competency 6-Specific Facet First Search

For my first database competency, I chose to search the database LibLit (Library Literature and Information Full Text) using a "specific facet first" search strategy. I decided to search for information on the topic of "the skill and educational requirements for law librarians today." I developed several facets: s1) Law librarian* or special librarian*; s2) education* or degree* or training; s3) skill* or abilit* or competenc*. The most specific facet was the first: "law librarian* or special librarian*." I checked myself on this by conducting searches on all three facets individually. The first facet gave me 3,435 records, the second returned 20,149 records, and the third produced 4,878 hits. This demonstrated that the first facet was indeed the most specific. I also decided that I would begin my search using only "law librarian*" initially, as this is the type of librarian that is really the target of my search. The operator "or" and term "special librarian*" could always be added back to this facet if results were too small. Conducting a search with "law librarian*" gave me 1,817 results.



Although this was quite a large result set, there were relevant articles on the very first page of my results. The first hit on the list would be quite useful for my purposes of learning about the debate over educational requirements for law librarians. It is an article titled, "Law Librarians: J.D. or Not J.D.?" by the author M. Whisner. I have copied the screen here:



I then decided that at this stage of my search, I would add in my second facet of "education* or degree* or training" with the Boolean operator "and." Doing so gave me 162 results as compared to the previous 1,817 records. On this screen, you can see that the first result is actually the same as the first result of my larger set of 1,817 records and the hit I chose to display above.


I applied a limiter to this set of results by limiting results to articles published between the years 2003 and 2009. This produced 49 hits. Titles included, "Credentials and Credibility.." and "Training Tomorrow's Leaders Today." These were all very relevant to my search topic of "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians?"

I thought this database was very easy to search and gave me good, relevant results in a very short amount of time. It was quite obvious when looking at my facets, which would be the most specific and therefore the first one to search with in employing this strategy. It was a large initial set to begin with, but easy to narrow down by adding in additional facets and limiters. The set was not too large that it could not be effectively narrowed, nor too small so that one would need to start over completely. This search strategy worked well for this topic in this database and I will definitely use it again.