The Lamont News-List March 6, 2006

The Lamont News-List lamontnews-list(a)fas.harvard.edu March 6, 2006 http://hcl.harvard.edu/lamont *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- 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! ********************************************************** 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/ ********************************************************** 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 sender’s 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! ********************************************************* 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. ********************************************************* 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! ********************************************************* 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. ********************************************************* You received this email because you subscribed to the Lamont News-List. If at any time you wish to stop receiving this newsletter, point your browser to http://lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/lamontnews-list. Directions for unsubscribing are at the bottom of the page. ********************************************************** Copyright 2006 President and Fellows of Harvard University