5 reasons you should have a library card

Graz University library. Source: Wikimedia.

One of the more powerful research tools
you can have is a library card.

I’ve written about why libraries are great before, but this is worth repeating:

      A library card is instant access to a world of resources. Both offline AND online.  

That might surprise you, but here are 5 reasons why you want a library card to be a great researcher. 

1.  Access to online paywall content.  My local library gives paywall access to Ancestry.com, Morningstar, online journals, and more.  It also provides Hoopla video (https://www.hoopladigital.com/ for downloads, and many free music downloads (lots of popular music, some of which really surprised me—this is free?  Yes!).  It also provides many different database services:  a small listing includes, Academic Onefile (journals, magazines, books, audio – great subject browser), InfoTrac (news and periodical.Updated daily.)  Can filter by type, sort by date.  General One File  and MasterFile Complete (EBSCO).  Many libraries have all this, and more. 

2.  eBooks.  Yes, just like physical books, many libraries support borrowing ebooks and e-magazines, typically with time restrictions on how long you can keep them, and sometimes twitchy software, but free’s free—I’ve read many books that I knew I only wanted for a short time. 

3.  Local archives. Many libraries have archival content that’s never going to make it online (at least in our lifetimes).  If you’re doing research on a particular location, visiting physically is often the best thing to do.  But if you can’t get there, checking out the online library can often lead to content that you won’t be able to find via search engines.  (Go figure.  For some reason, many local libraries have put great content online, but then set it up so the search engines can’t index it, making it effectively offline.  On the other hand, if you connect via the library, you can often browse that content.) 

4.  Classes. I teach at libraries. So do lots of other people with great skills.  Local libraries are especially good on local history, genealogy classes, general internet skill tutorials, and basic computer skills (such as the common applications).  Sometimes libraries put these classes (at least the lecture parts) up on YouTube.  

5.  Reference Librarians.  They’re excellent resources of information and a source of research skills.  When you go to your public library, be sure to chat with the reference librarians.  They are, in essence, professional SearchReseachers.  They know all kinds of things that are key to finding information (both online and offline) in places and in ways you might not have thought about.  (Better yet:  Many of them are available via IMs and email.  Remember the superb “Ask-A-Librarian” service is always available.  They might take a day to get back to you, but they’re very, very good.)  

How to get a library card:  In the US it's easy--just go there and fill out a simple application form.  Generally, they want you to be somewhat local, but that's not always the case.  (I have a Los Angeles County library card because I used to live in LA County--that was good enough.)   I make it a habit to check out the libraries at different places I visit because you never know what's possible or what they have.  Libraries are very different from each other.  When you visit, ask to see their list of online resources, and if you can get a card that will allow remote access. You'll be surprised how often they'll say yes.  

College and University library cards.  Note that college or university library cards often come with even deeper research databases than public libraries.  Alumni can often get a library card that will allow access to their paywall access databases.  I have a couple of these (from different places where I've attended or taught.)  If you can get one, get it. Check out the alumni web pages at your university or college.  Again, the libraries vary tremendously.  See what your college offers.  

Virtual library card:   You can get a "virtual library card" from a number of places.  The Internet Archive has one that seems to be accepted at a surprising number of places.  But a quick search for [ "virtual library card" ] will show you a number of real libraries that hand out virtual cards to anyone who applies.  With these virtual cards, you will have access to a large number of resources, including most of those listed above.  

(And if you have great research experiences with your local library, write in and let us know.  I'm especially interested in the online library card experiences of people not in the US!)  

Search on, with your library card!  

Search Challenge (Oct 15, 2014): A few musical questions

Playing a little slack key guitar at Burning Man 2010

As you probably know, I'm a musician by avocation and play something nearly every day.  My piano is in the living room, my guitar and synth are in my home office, and I just acquired a new ukelele for those moments of singing in the back yard or at the beach!  

So as you'd expect, I often come across questions in my day-to-day that require a bit of search.  Here are a few fun searches I've done recently.  I don't think they're all that hard, but solving them led me to realize a few things about the changing nature of information on the web.  

Here, for your musical education are three questions I looked up recently. Can you also find the answers?  

1.  What's a plagal cadence?  What does it sound like?  Where might I have heard one before?   

2.  What's a Steely Dan chord?  Can you find an example of one that I can hear?  (That is, in isolation.  I know I can find lots of Steely Dan music online.)  

3.  Is there any connection between trumpet playing and getting hemorrhoids?  There are lots of anecdotes, but can you find reliable data on this?  

4.  I love listening to the music of folk singer Jez Lowe.  In his lyrics he keeps mentioning Durham (such as "Back in the Durham Jail").  Problem is there're a lot of Durhams in the world.  Which Durham is he talking about?  

Enjoy the music of the search while searching on! 

Answer: Three little language questions...

Don't write notes like this. Make sure you can read them later. 

Because of a note written in haste, I found myself having to do research on my own note.  (Comment to self: Write clearly in the future!)  

In any event, this rapid scrawl gave rise to some interesting questions.  It's actually just three little questions I found myself researching this week.  Can you solve these questions too? 

1.  As I mentioned, I'm getting better from my illness rather slowly.  Little by little, I'm getting back to my normal self.  Now, as I write to you, I realize that there doesn't seem to be an English word to describe this... or is there?  Can you find a single English word that describe the process of a long, slow, restoration to normal health?  What's that word?  

2.  Can you help me figure out what the name of this fish really is?  While lying in bed, I was looking over my scribbled notes from the Fiji trip.  One of my notes captured something one of my dive buddies said.  (See image above.) My handwritten memo says, "Check out the NeoclXXXX YYYYYYY when you get home. Cool fish."  It doesn't actually say XXXX YYYYY, but those are the characters I can't read in my scrawl. It's clearly the Latin name of the fish, it's just that the second half of the first word and the entire second word is illegible.   My dive buddy said it has a truly memorable common name, if only I could figure it out.  What is it? 

3.  As I was thinking about these things, I started to worry about the future of the corals all around the planet.  As you know, they're under some environmental stresses that are causing worldwide declines.  I wanted to read something about them, and thought that what I should do is to search for an article that talks about coral in the "future perfect" tense.  (That is, a sentence that describes an action that will be completed in the future.)  Can you find a sentence that is in the "future perfect" tense that's all about the state of coral? (HINT:  Don't just search for coral and then start scanning.  Remember what I've told you about problems like this--when it seems crazy hard, look for WHAT first?)  

Answers: 

1.  "A single English word that describes the process of a long, slow, restoration to normal health?"  

In this particular case I turned to an expert, my friend Erin McKean (a dictionary evangelist who is a  dressmaking, roller skating lexicographer of enormous wit, style, and wisdom).  She wrote back that the word I was seeking is 

     lysis

which she found by "...doing a reverse dictionary search on the Historical Thesaurus of English (which is paywalled as part of the OED) and looked for the word 'recovery' there." 

That was a brilliant move.  

The word she found,  lysis, has two meanings.  Here's the definition from Google, which you get by doing the query [ define lysis ]: 

I didn't want to spend any money doing this search, but I went to the HTE site and discovered that that have a subscription service.  Curious, I clicked on the link and found that you can use your library card to login.  (Assuming that your library subscribes.)  Just on a lark, I tried my local library card number (for the Palo Alto library system) and it just worked!  Amazingly enough, I have complete access to the OED subscription service, including their reverse dictionary application, just as Erin described.  

Of course, you could also use our regular standard, the OneLook reverse dictionary (which I always get to with a quick [ reverse dictionary] search:  

Here you can see that I did a query for [ gradual recovery ] in OneLook reverse dictionary, and found that the first word was "lysis."  

As several people noted in the comments, "convalescence" is also a good word to describe a slow recovery, but the definition of the word doesn't actually include a sense of lengthy and slow (you can have a rapid convalescence), whereas lysis actually does have a slightly deeper sense of slow and gradual.  

On the other hand, lysis is such a rare word that few people will understand your clever and subtle semantics, so maybe "convalescence" is actually better for the majority of cases.  



2.  Can you help me figure out what the name of this fish really is?  While lying in bed, I was looking over my scribbled notes from the Fiji trip.  One of my notes captured something one of my dive buddies said.  (See image above.) My handwritten memo says, "Check out the NeoclXXXX YYYYYYY when you get home. Cool fish." 

One of the important skills of answering questions like this one is to understand exactly what's being said, and what's being asked.  

Lots of commenters kept looking for fishes from the area around Fiji.  But if you read carefully, I was lying in my bed at home, looking at my notes from the Fiji trip.  Clearly, the note was written while in Fiji. BUT the unstated bit of background information is that we had been talking about fish in general, not necessarily those from Fijian waters.  (And in truth, in this particular case, we'd been talking about fish that live in the sea off the California coast. But you couldn't know that unless you were there.)  

In any case, the challenge is to find a Latin name of a fish that's shaped like this:  NeoclXXXX YYYYYYY  That's all we know about it.  (Oh.. and the common name for it is pretty interesting.)  

In this case, I don't know of any search engine method that would work (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Alpha... it doesn't matter, none of them do this kind of within-the-word analysis).  

We need something that has tools for doing wildcards within the word.  

A wildcard is just a way of specifying a pattern that the tool should match.  

There are two common kinds of wildcards:  

*  - the asterisk is used to match many characters.
       Example: dog* will match dogs, doggerel, doggy, etc.  

?  - the question mark is usually used to match a single character.
       Example:  d?g will match dog, dig, dag, etc.  

Now we need to know (or search out) a tool that does this kind of wildcarding within the word.  

Once again, I turned to the OneLook dictionary service, because they have exactly this kind of thing.  (For dyed-in-the-wool SearchResearchers, I suggest you read their FAQ page which tells you all of the wonderful things they support.)  

To solve this Challenge I went to OneLook and did this:  

My query is: 

    [ Neocl*  * ] 

The first asterisk after "Neocl" means to "show all completions of that word."  

The second asterisk means to show "all words that follow any completion of 'Neocl*'."  

When I run the query, I get this as the SERP:  

As you scan this list, you'll see that phrases 50 - 53 look like Latin names of animals.  A few quick clicks show you that Neoclaviceps is a kind of fungus, Neocleptria is kind of Australian moth, and Neoclinus blanchardi is a "is a small but ferocious fish which has a large mouth and aggressive territorial behavior..."  And it has the remarkable name, Sarcastic Fringehead.  

That's it!  This really is a remarkable animal.  Here's a YouTube video that gives a great look at this Californian fish. 

Here's an example of using the ? wildcard in Onelook.  My query is 

     [ catal??? ] 

which means "show me all of the words that start with 'catal' and then have exactly 3 letters following that prefix."  Here's the answer: 

(That funny diamond/question-mark at number 34 is an improperly rendered ñ character.)  

You might be wondering why I didn't do a query like: 

     [  Neocl?????   ???????  ]

the answer is that I wasn't sure of exactly how many characters there were following the "Neocl" nor how many characters were in the second word.  If you use the * symbol, it will match any number of characters.  But if you guess wrong with the number of ? marks in your query, you'll never find it.  So I went for the more general query that would certainly include the results, rather than going with the hyperspecific ? query symbols.  

3.   Can you find a sentence that is in the "future perfect" tense that's all about the state of coral? 

My hint was to "search for a tool" that can do this.  I searched for a bit and found Fraze.it 

Fraze is described as a "search engine for sentences."  It really is a collection of sentences that have been parsed for part-of-speech (such as nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.) and the tense of the verb.  

If you go to their page and check out one of the examples, it's pretty clear to see how to find sentences written in the future perfect tense, and then it's clear how to do a query like this: 

They use a fairly sophisticated sentence analysis and tagging tool that you can query using the query-building tool on the left hand side of the display.  

If you're at all interested in language, this is worth spending some time learning.  

Note that Fraze.it also works over corpora in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.  


Search Lessons: 

I hope these questions made it clear that there are tools (OED, OneLook, Fraze.IT) that are much better at dealing with language details than the major search engines.  

So why don't Google (et al.) offer these kinds of operations?  Because it's really expensive to do this for the entire web content.  Dictionary services and "phrase services" (like Fraze.IT) can do this kind of detailed analysis because they operate over a relatively small amount of content.  They build very sophisticated indicies of their content--tagging each word in a sentence with its part-of-speech, for example--and then provide search interfaces that let you search-inside the structure of the dictionary entires, or the syntactic structure of sentences in their collections.  

And to return to our first question and its framing.. One of the most important skills to develop is a sense of what is being asked.  Lots of people got stuck on finding the fish that lives in Fiji, when I never said that was a constraint.  

This kind of determination is obviously best done in person.  That's what a librarian does when doing the "references interview."  It's that sometimes subtle back-and-forth to determine what the question asker really means, and what kind of an answer they're really looking for.  

This is a skill that's discussed in great depth in the book Reference and Information Services: An Introduction  by  Richard E Bopp, Linda C. Smith (eds.)  (2011) 


Search on! 

Wednesday Search Challenge (10/8/14): Three little language questions...

Our motivating example: A scribbled, partly unintelligible note to myself. Can you help me figure it out?

THIS has been a bit of a tough couple of weeks.  Yes, I went to Fiji and saw the fabulous world of fish  (Titan triggerfish) and fantastic corals, but on the return flight home, I picked up some evil variation cold/flu.  The past two weeks have been pretty unpleasant.  

The good news is that I'm slowly--very slowly--coming back to normal.  

This is somewhat unusual, as I generally bounce back from an illness very quickly. I'm not sure why this particular illness is taking so long.  But as you might imagine, even this causes me to wonder... and when I find myself wondering something, I generally turn to my favorite search engine to figure out what's going on.  

And this leads to today's linguistic Search Challenge.  

It's actually just three little questions I found myself researching this week.  Can you solve these questions too? 

1.  As I mentioned, I'm getting better from my illness rather slowly.  Little by little, I'm getting back to my normal self.  Now, as I write to you, I realize that there doesn't seem to be an English word to describe this... or is there?  Can you find a single English word that describe the process of a long, slow, restoration to normal health?  What's that word?  

2.  Can you help me figure out what the name of this fish really is?  While lying in bed, I was looking over my scribbled notes from the Fiji trip.  One of my notes captured something one of my dive buddies said.  (See image above.) My handwritten memo says, "Check out the NeoclXXXX YYYYYYY when you get home. Cool fish."  It doesn't actually say XXXX YYYYY, but those are the characters I can't read in my scrawl. It's clearly the Latin name of the fish, it's just that the second half of the first word and the entire second word is illegible.   My dive buddy said it has a truly memorable common name, if only I could figure it out.  What is it? 

3.  As I was thinking about these things, I started to worry about the future of the corals all around the planet.  As you know, they're under some environmental stresses that are causing worldwide declines.  I wanted to read something about them, and thought that what I should do is to search for an article that talks about coral in the "future perfect" tense.  (That is, a sentence that describes an action that will be completed in the future.)  Can you find a sentence that is in the "future perfect" tense that's all about the state of coral?  (HINT:  Don't just search for coral and then start scanning.  Remember what I've told you about problems like this--when it seems crazy hard, look for WHAT first?)  

Be sure to tell us how you approached these three little problems.  FWIW, these aren't that hard... IF you know how to tackle these problems.  (This was about 2 minutes of searching on my part.)  How long will it take you? 

Search on! 

Answer: YOU make up the Challenge!

Diving in Fiji.  Huge numbers of colorful fish on the coral reef.

As usually happens, this turned out to be deeper and more interesting than I'd expected.  (That's one of the things I love about writing this blog--there's always something more to learn that holds my attention powerfully.)  

This week's Challenge was... 

2.  Can you create a Search Challenge that highlights the use of the  subject: operator in Google Books? 

Ideally, you'll write a Challenge that requires the use of a search in Google Books that needs the subject: + subject-heading method to be solvable.  

As you found out, this is actually a little tricky.  It's easy to write a simple question ("Is an ostrich's eye bigger than its brain?")  But it's harder to write a Challenge question that actually requires the use of a particular skill.  

In this case, the skill we're highlighting is "use of the subject: operator in Google Books."  

When I write the weekly Challenges, I try to make it so the Challenge can be solve ONLY with the skill (or data) under consideration.  And that's often the tricky part.  

So let's think about what the subject: operator does... Basically, it just limits or scopes the search to books that have that particular tag in the metadata.  

An example:  Suppose I want to find a book that talks about the color of reef fishes.  (I want to know the answer to the question: "Why are the fish on the reef so colorful?")  

One approach might be to Books searches like

     [ coral reef fish color ] 

but this kind of search is pretty open-ended; it returns lots of books (e.g., "reef fish coloring book") that aren't especially well-suited to what we seek.  

One way to focus the search (or, in other words, scope the search--see my earlier post about why scoping is a key skill for SearchResearch) is to use the Subject Headings. 

In this case, I'll go to the BISAC Subject Headings Complete List, and look for the subject "Science."  If I click on that link I'll be taken to the complete list of Science subjects (at least according to BISAC).  Control-F for "Icthyology" leads me to the subject heading: 

     SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Zoology / Ichthyology & Herpetology 

Now, if I do a search like this (in Books):  

     [ coral reef fish color subject:"SCIENCE / Life Sciences / Zoology / Ichthyology & Herpetology" ] 

I'll get a very focused set of results, one of which will very likely have what I'm searching for. 

Notice that I had to include the entire string of the subject heading.  (And using the code, "SCI070010" just won't work at all.)  

And, sure enough, the second book in the list "Fish: An Enthusiast's Guide" (Peter B. Moyle) has several very nice sections that describe why reef fish are colored the way they are.  (In short, there's cryptic coloration, countershading, poster colors, disruptive coloration, and so on. Fascinating stuff... and it's not all just camouflage.)

I'd argue that this would have been a difficult search to do without the scoping provided by the subject: field.  

Browsing:  One thing people say to me all the time (when talking about Books online) is "I just can't browse online books the way I browse books in a bookstore."  

I feel their pain--one of my very favorite things to do is to wander through a bookstore and see what's there.  We can't quite do that yet.  BUT we can give you an experience that's close to the sense of scanning the nearby bookshelves.  There are two ways to do this.  

Browsing Method #1:  Use the related books function.  When you click on "About this book" link (on the left hand side of the page view)... 

you'll immediately see a bunch of additional information about this book, INCLUDING "Related Books" 

Notice how you can scroll left and right to see more books that are closely related to this one. 

Browsing Method #2:  The other way to browse is by scrolling down and looking at the "Common terms" and "Subjects" (that is, the subject headings in the book's metadata).  Look at the following image....  I've scrolled the "About this book" view down far enough to see the "Common Terms" and the "Bibliographic Information."  

Note the Subjects list.  Guess what those are!  

You can browse subjects in Books by clicking on those links, which will then do the subject: search for you automatically.  (And note in particular, the last link is exactly the BISAC subject heading we got by browsing in their master list.)  

There's much more to say about this, but I want to wrap it up for today.  (We'll return to this topic.)  

Search Lessons:  First off, the subject: operator in Books is very powerful.  Once you learn how to use it (and remember how to get to the master list), it's your friend for life.  (Now that I know about to use it, my searches in Books have become more precise and relevant.  There's stuff in Books that I never thought I could find.)  

Second, remember the subjects list at the end of "About this book."  It's a great way to browse around, especially when you're just learning about a topic.  (As an example, check out the subject headings on the book "Your Guide to the National Parks." You'll learn about the space of National Parks and travel in the US very quickly.  I predict you'll find books by browsing like this that you'd never find any other way.  It is, in effect, powerbrowsing.  

Search on! (Subjectively!) 

Search Challenge (10/1/14): YOU make up the challenge!

As you can tell, I'm still catching up.  I've got a queue of about 4 posts I still need to make to get back up to real-time, so I'm going to start by posting an unusual Search Challenge for today.  

The Challenge today is for YOU to create a Challenge of your own!  It's a Reverse-Challenge day.  

Let me scope out the Challenge.  

First, I'd like to tell you something about how to search in Google Books that you probably don't know.  

Then, after you've got that, you get to explore a bit and then post a Challenge of your own into the comments. 

On Friday, I'll talk about what happened, and what we found out collectively.  Ready?  

1.  How to Search Google Books Search by Subject Heading 

One of the nicest (and least known) of all the features in Google Books is "Search by Subject Heading."  That is, you can use a subject heading string (found in either the Library of Congress (LC) Subject Headings list, OR the BISAC subject headings) 

For example, if you go to Google Books and do the query: 

     [ armor subject:"World War, 1939-1945" ]

The quoted phrase "Word War, 1939-1945" is the official subject heading name of that war.  

The big advantages of doing a search like this is that you can use pretty common terms (say, "armor") and get search results back in the context of that subject heading.  If you just go to Google Books and search for [ armor ], you'll get back a lot of results, few of which have anything to do with World War II.  But by contrast, this is what you get back from this search--targeted, relevant, focused results:  

You could do the same thing and use the the BISAC subject heading:

    [ armor subject:"HISTORY / Military / World War II" ]

See the difference? The results are more-or-less the same, but both subject catalogs have slightly different ways of representing the world.  (More on this in a later post.) 

How do you get to the subject headings listing?  Well, telling you to search would be too obvious, so let me give you the links and save you one search: 

     Library of Congress Subject Headings search interface

     BISAC Subject Headings browse interface 

They're very different interfaces.  Here they are side-by-side: 

As you can see, the LC subject headings page has a search interface, while the BISAC (which is run by the BISG) has more of a click-to-browse style.  Both are useful; it depends on if you need any prompting as you do your search for a subject heading.  

Once you've found your subject heading entry, you just copy it out (see the text highlighted in blue below?  that's what you copy), and then paste into the quotes after the subject: keyword as shown above. 

Then, the query [ armor ] makes a LOT more sense when the scope of books being searched are those tagged with the LC subject heading "World War, 1939-1945"  (which is a phrase for WW2 that you'd never guess).  

With me so far?  

Now for today's Challenge:  

2.  Can you create a Search Challenge that highlights the use of the  subject: operator in Google Books? 

That is, you get to be me! 

Ideally, you'll write a Challenge that requires the use of a search in Google Books that needs the subject: + subject-heading method to be solvable.  

Once you've written your Challenge, post it to the comments below, and let's see if we can figure out what really interesting kinds of subject-headings (and their uses) we can discover. 

Sample Challenge:  "For today's Search Challenge, can you find a book about insects that feed on other insects and can cause sterility?" 

Sample Answer:  Using LC, I searched for "parasite insect" and learned that there is a subject heading called "Insects--Parasites" (the double dashes are important!).  Searching Google Books with 

     [ subject:"Insects--Parasites" sterility ] 

led me to a few books, one of which is Parasites in Social Insects, by Paul Schmid-Hempel, 1998. (Check out the cover for an astonishing photo.) In this book the author notes that some wasp species in Europe are parasitized by a variety of nematode that causes "parasitic castration" leading to infertility. (And be sure to search in the book for the phrase "brain worm," and learn something amazing about certain ant parasites that cause huge changes in ant behavior.)  

You, of course, should pursue your own interests and discover what wonderful things you can find in Google Books by using this new search method.  

Be sure to tell us how to solved your Challenge, and tell us of any interesting discoveries you made along the way.  

Search (and create Challenges) on!