The Lamont News-List lamontnews-list(a)fas.harvard.edu
March 6, 2006 http://hcl.harvard.edu/lamont
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A new exhibit on Level 1 in Lamont showcases prize-winning entries of the
2005 CERtoon (Carbon Emissions Reduction Cartoon Competition), brought to
you by the Harvard Green Campus Initiative and the FAS Campus Energy
Reduction Program. Tickle your brain and your funny bone by having a look!
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IN THIS ISSUE:
-- Cool Tools on Lamont Library Reference Shelves
Regional English at Your Fingertips
-- Power Searching Tip
no. 5: Creating nested" searches in HOLLIS and other e-resources
-- The E-Research Quick Search Page
When a few good articles is all you need!
-- Missed an issue of the Lamont News-List?
Previous issues are archived here:
http://lists.fas.harvard.edu/pipermail/lamontnews-list/
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COOL TOOLS ON LAMONT LIBRARY'S REFERENCE SHELVES
**The DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN REGIONAL ENGLISH (DARE)
Lamont REF ROOM PE2843 .D52 1985-
What's a good old fashioned New England winter without some *black ice*, a
*bob house*, *kiddly-benders,* or *robin snow*?
Words this wonderful, strange, and (sometimes) puzzling deserve to be
collected, codified and defined. That's just what _The Dictionary of
American Regional English_ -- a compendium of who says what where -- is
designed to do.
DARE has been lauded as an "awesome" achievement and as "the most
important work ever undertaken in the field of American speech." Such
reviews are all the more impressive when you realize that DARE isn't even
finished yet!
It has been forty years (and two months) since the first DARE fieldworkers
fanned out across America in camper-rigged Dodge "word wagons," hauling
suitcase-sized tape recorders. Using an ambitious questionnaire that took
10 hours to administer, they sampled the speech of 2777 Americans of all
ages and backgrounds in 1002 towns across the country. The result of this
effort is a dictionary that has appeared in installments since 1985 and is
now 4 volumes strong. Entries are arranged alphabetically and currently
run from A-Sk. The remaining volume (Sl-Z) is slated to appear in 2008,
and a capstone volume, a great index to the whole, is promised for 2010.
For students engaged in cultural, sociological, and literary research,
_The Dictionary of Regional English_ is a veritable treasure house of the
good, the bad, and the ugly in the American word-scape. The information
here draws on everything from folklore, to foodways, to children's games,
to the painful history of religious and ethnic slurs.
DARE features thousands of computer-generated maps that make clear (for
example) just why Minnesotan Bob Dylan sang about Highway (and not Route)
61. Entries are cross-indexed, so you can chase the 79 regional synonyms
for dragonfly, or track down the eight variations of dust bunnies across
the United States. If you're curious about what it means to "jump the
broom" or if you've ever wondered why a milkshake is a "frappe" in
Massachusetts but a "cabinet" just across the border in Rhode Island, DARE
is the place to go!
Although there is no online version of the _Dictionary_, audio clips from
the original DARE interviews can be accessed at this website:
(http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html). Some of these DARE tapes,
in fact, have been used by Hollywood and Broadway dialect coaches. DARE
has even been consulted by forensic linguists to analyze threatening
messages for clues to the senders background.
You'll find DARE shelved among the PEs on Lamont Reference's "Wall of
English Dictionaries," which runs the gamut from Anglo-Saxon to American
slang. Be warned, though: DARE is hard to put down once you open it up!
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POWER SEARCHING
Tip No. 5: Creating "nested" searches in HOLLIS and other e-resources
Even if you've never heard the term "nesting" before, the principle behind
it is already familiar to you. Today's Power Searching Tip comes straight
out of basic math.
A long time ago, you learned to change the sense (and sum) of a string of
numbers, like 5 x 7 + 4, by introducing parentheses: 5 x (7 + 4). In the
HOLLIS catalog, it's possible to express -- and change -- the
relationships between a string of search terms by the very same means.
"Nesting" is a method of grouping words parenthetically in order to
clarify the logic of a search statement. The parentheses tell the
computer how to process the parts of your search: what to look for first,
what terms to combine, and in what way.
Here's an example: a simple keyword search for BIOLOGICAL AND MILITARY OR
DEFENSE in the HOLLIS catalog will produce more than 19,000 "hits"
(results). A nested search for the same terms -- BIOLOGICAL AND (MILITARY
OR DEFENSE) -- yields a mere 169.
What accounts for the discrepancy? The second, nested search
redistributes the "weights" of each term. HOLLIS recognizes that you are
treating "military" and "defense" as synonyms, and that EITHER word is
acceptable, as long it appears in a catalog record that ALSO contains the
word "biological."
Without the parentheses, the system will retrieve items that contain BOTH
"biological" and "military" OR any item at all in which the word "defense"
appears. Your chances of having to sift through irrelevant information
dramatically increase.
Like truncation (Power Searching Tip no.1), nesting enables you to extend
the reach of a keyword search while preserving a good degree of precision.
Nesting is a far more sophisticated approach to searching than truncation,
however.
Truncation relies entirely on the flexible spelling of individual terms
(famil? = family or families or familiar or familiarity).
The key to nesting is logical strategy: careful word positioning and
attention to the relationships between ideas.
When should you use it? Whenever you need to separate primary and
secondary search emphases, and whenever you can anticipate alternative
search terms that might be worth a try.
Examples:
a. (TEENAGERS OR ADOLESCENTS) AND SMOKING
b. (SMOKING OR TOBACCO OR CIGARETTES) AND (ILLNESS OR CANCER OR HEALTH)
You'll find that truncation and nesting are often used together to create
elaborate, even elegant search statements. Next time you feel like
experimenting, see what happens when you enter this search string into the
HOLLIS catalog:
BIOLOGICAL AND (WEAPON? OR WAR OR WARFARE) AND (MILITARY OR DEFENSE)
**And by the way: nesting -- just like truncation (Tip no. 1) -- is
possible in most of Harvard's e-resources.
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THE E-RESEARCH QUICK SEARCH PAGE
When a few good articles is all you need!
Quick Search Page
http://e-research.lib.harvard.edu?func=quick-1
Lamont Reference Librarians see enough students each week to know that all
research papers aren't created equal. A 30 page semester-long project for
a junior tutorial is of a different order than an 8-12 page paper assigned
in a Core.
Any research paper carries with it an expectation that you'll responsibly
survey the published scholarship on your topic, of course. But because
shorter (and shorter term) projects serve different academic and learning
ends, they require you to be reasonably thorough, rather than absolutely
exhaustive, in the information-gathering that you do. Learning the
intricacies of a discipline or all of the sophisticated search features of
a Harvard e-resource isn't always necessary (or even efficient) when
you're simply trying to uncover a few good articles to corroborate an
argument or add the voice of an authority to your own claims.
For projects like these, we often encourage students to turn to a Harvard
resource like Academic Search Premier
(http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:ebscoasp), because of its
broad coverage and its multidisciplinary sweep. Or we might suggest you
try a "Quick Search," one of the options available to you via the Harvard
Libraries E-Research page.
The Quick Search environment is comprised of 19 "sets" covering subjects
from Anthropology, to Literature and Film, to Public Health. Each subject
set contains 3, 4, or more e-Resources which are capable of being
searched simultaneously. Three additional sets are labeled "General" (for
topics that resist neat subject classification), "General Science," and
"General + HOLLIS" (in case you want to search the catalog, too).
The simplicity of the system makes Quick Search the Libraries' answer to
Google; the quality of the information you get is as good as anything that
you'll find on Google Scholar, and often surpasses it.
In Google or Google Scholar, you're never sure what it is you're
searching, only that you're in a vast universe of information "out there."
By contrast, Quick Search sets always provide you with context, so you'll
have a sense as you search of what's coming from where. Each time a Quick
Search begins, the screen displays the names of the e-resources within the
set you're searching, along with a running tally of the "hits" (matches)
it finds in each.
When the process of "fetching" this information is complete, the top
results from each e-resource are combined into a list of selected
articles, books, and other materials that your search has retrieved.
Results will display in reverse chronological order (or roughly so); if
you prefer the Google experience of "relevancy," however, you can re-sort
a results list by "rank."
Quick Search results are linked to our "Find it @ Harvard" citation linker
software, so you can easily determine if the full-text of an article is
available online.
In the Quick Search environment, you rely entirely on keywords, and you
can't apply limits (like language, for example), such as HOLLIS allows.
Thus, you may have to experiment with several search statements before you
strike gold.
If a keyword string doesn't pull up the information you'd hoped for, try
putting an "and" between your terms. We've found that this one little
word can sometimes make a big difference in how much you find.
Truncation may help you to increase your yield as well. Quick Search
recognizes either the asterisk (*) or the question mark (?) when appended
to a root word.
And incidentally: You can set aside any item that looks promising just by
clicking on the + (plus sign) to its right. When you're ready review your
list, click on the My Research tab and you'll find your information stored
in a folder called "My Citations." From there, you can save, send, or
print.
If you've logged in to E-Research before you start, moreover, there's even
a way to save a search so you can rerun it at a later time. Ask us to
show you how!
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HAVE A TOPIC you'd like to see us cover in a future issue of the Lamont
News-List? A research question you need answered? A tip you want
to pass along to other Lamont News-List readers? All suggestions welcome!
Send your thoughts and comments to sgilroy(a)fas.harvard.edu.
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Copyright 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard University
