Chemical Literature (Chem 184/284)

Lecture 3: Using Online Databases, Part I: Web Search Engines vs. Traditional Article Indexes vs. Library Catalogs
Part II: Locating Books and Journals in the UCSB Library: How to Use the MELVYL and PEGASUS Catalogs
Quiz Questions

Question 1: Assume that you performed a search on Google™ on a specific topic yesterday, then repeated the search today and the answer at the top of the list yesterday is no longer there. Which of the following is a plausible reason that the answer is no longer where you saw it yesterday?

1. _____ The page was removed from the web.
   
2. _____ A new page appeared on the web which Google™ calculated was more relevant than the previous page.
   
3. _____ The CEO of Google™ is trying to mess with your mind.
   
4. _____ The Google&trade: robots/search programs ran a new search and found a page which had not been previously indexed that bumped the previous page from the top spot.
   
5. _____ You made a mistake in searching either the first time, the second time, or both.

Question 2: Searching in an article database you found a relevant article which is available on the Web. Doing the same search on a Web search engine, however, you didn't find the article. Whick of the following might plausibly explain why one search found the article and the other didn't?

1. _____ The article was not freely accessible to the Web search engines searching software.
2. _____ Your search term matched one of the intellectually-assigned subject headings for the article in the index database, but it did not appear in the terms indexed by the Web search engine.
3. _____ Since the article database and the Web search engine sort their results differently, the Web search engine placed the article much lower in its search results, and so you didn't spot it.
4. _____ The terms you searched on were in the full text of the article but not in the title.

Question 3: For each case below, give the most effective choice of field to search and search terms for use with the PEGASUS Catalog:

Example	Search Field	Search Terms
A book on nuclear magnetic resonance
Biochemistry by Lehninger
All books written by Linus Pauling
The journal Inorganic Chemistry

Question 4:The MARC record for an item in a library catalog, like PEGASUS or MELVYL, contains some information (e.g. language of the item, or format of the item) that cannot be searched for directly in either Basic or Advanced Search in our catalogs. They can only be used to limit other searches. Why is that?

1. _____ Those data have not been indexed by the catalog.
2. _____ The catalog designers assume that the average user would not be looking for "all books in English" or "all items published in 1997".
3. _____ Language, format and date information are not available for every item, so you can't make them search options.
4. _____ There are too many items with the same language, date or format to make them searchable.

Question 5:Rank the following PEGASUS keyword searches in order (1-4) from most general to most specific.

1. _____ polymerase AND chain AND reaction
2. _____ polymerase %2 chain %2 reaction
3. _____ polymerase !2 chain !2 reaction
4. _____ polymerase OR chain OR reaction

Question 6:The Library of Congress classification system lets our library shelve books in order by subject. In that case, why do we need to have a catalog that's searchable by subject when you could just go to the shelves and browse?

1. _____ The LC classification system is too hard for anyone but a librarian to understand.
2. _____ The LC classification system sometimes can't keep up with new concepts in research.
3. _____ A book may contain multiple concepts, but it can only be shelved in one place.
4. _____ Some topics, especially in interdisciplinary research, may fit just as well under two or more possible call numbers.

This page created by Chuck Huber (huber@library.ucsb.edu).
Updated: 11/28/07 09:30:20