Information Literacy, Level Two

Think of students writing a book review for a class.  If we have a book about social media, most people will probably include social media in their description.  However, Peter uses the words "online social networks", and his classmate Mary discusses establishing a personal presence on the web.   Computers look for exact matches when processing data.  A computer searching through the class book reports for social media would not find either Peter's or Mary's book reviews because they did not use "social media" to describe the book.

Subject headings or controlled vocabulary are a way to ensure that everyone looking for information about  social media finds all the material available.  Database planners add a field to the item's description containing uniform, agreed-upon terms describing subject content.  So the teacher in our example above would enter all his student book reviews into the computer adding the Subject heading: "social media" to each book review for the book.  The teacher might also include book reviews that the same students had written on The Scarlet Letter and Harry Potter.  They would have the subject headings "Literature" and "Fantasy."   At the end of the semester, the teacher can use the Find function to find those reviews with the words "social media" in the document.  Some reviews would contain social media in the student description (abstract), some would not,  but all the relevant reviews would have the subject heading "social media" added by the teacher.

Note: Subject terms are consistent in the database you are in. They may vary database to database, so just be aware of this as you are using them in your research.

As I suggested above vocabulary is important.  If you know or find a good book or article, look at the subject headings.  Is there a subject heading that describes what you want?  Click on it to find all the books or articles on your topic.  I am looking at material on the Civil War.   When I typed Civil War in the keyword box many titles were listed.  Based on the title I clicked on the following book to get a more complete description..  

The American Civil War : a military history

I am a student looking for criticism of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.  Which of these subject headings would I use?  Hint: Louisa was born in 1832 and died in 1888.  Notice that the subject headings are divided into centuries, so while you cannot pick exact date you would pick the appropriate century.

Subject headings are a great way to explore your topic more. Say you want to write a paper about special education for the disabled, but were not sure how to narrow down the topic.  If we look in the education database ERIC,  there is a thesaurus.  The thesaurus is a listing of subject term that the database producers assign to articles.  When I look up disabilities in the ERIC thesaurus I get the following entry: