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Native American Research Tutorial

Searching the Catalog: Keyword Searching

Keyword searches are good ways to begin a search. Begin by brainstorming about your topic.

For example, if you need information about traditional Hopi culture, here are some possible keywords:

• Hopi
• Hopi culture
• Hopi mythology
• Hopi religion

Note: It is generally better to search more than one word with a keyword search, because this will help in searching for relevance.

Enter the terms into the library catalog search screen, select Keyword Relevance, than click on "Search":

The results. Note that there is an extremely high number of results because you have search for either hopi or mythology. However, the results have been sorted by relevance, so the most helpful items should be arranged at the beginning (this is not always the case, however).

Relevance is indicated by the colored bars to the left:

Generally relevance is indicated by the following colors: 5 red bars are high relevance, 4 green bars still pretty high, 3 blue bars is becoming less relevant, 2 yellow still less, and one gray bar means that only one of the words from your search came up. Let's see what happens when we only search by one term:

Even though we reduced the number of results, we also made it so that there is no indication of relevance, so the results may be less helpful.

A better way of reducing results is to place quotation marks around the terms. Entering the search terms with quotes will make sure that we only find results with the terms together:

The results. We now have a much more limited list:

Now let's choose an item to see what the record looks like:

Note that there are several portions to a record. The above example shows the Bibliographic portion of the record. This is where we find the location, call number, and status of an item.

This is the Holdings portion of the record. Here we find Library of Congress Subject Headings listed. These headings can be helpful in finding more books about the subject you are looking for.

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