Library Is A Verb

This section explores the ways you go about searching for information as well as ways to improve your research skills.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) uses what is called controlled vocabulary. They are the big red books kept behind the reference desk. They can be helpful for two reasons:

• Gather more terms (in general) to incorporate into your search, and
• Provide useful subject headings for book searches.

The burden is on you to find the rights to use in your searches. While it can give you useful terms, it also controls teh vocabulary used to find books. You don't have to guess what the book is about. These subject and concept terms help guide you to best terms for library catalog use. You can learn what the appropriate search term is and how to narrow it or broaden it. There are a few terms you will need learn: UF means "Used For" and it is not recommended that you use the terms in this list for catalog searches for books. "BT" means "broad terms" and these terms are broader than the term you are looking up. The opposite is true of "NT" or narrow terms. These terms are more narrow than your term. "RT" means related terms, which are synonyms.

Here's what a page looks like.

Now you can view the entire LCSH online.

It is not unusual that fields such as medicine (MESH) or education (ERIC), for instance, to have their own controlled vocabulary. In fact, Moody Library has MedLine with MESH.

After determining your thesis, try using this especially when you are stumped and and not having good results.

As you do your research, it will often take two different approaches: one for books and another for journal articles. Searching for books is somewhat similar to searching for journal articles. One major difference is taking advantage of the Library of Congress subject headings. The Classic catalog is a great tool to search for specific titles, authors, or subjects.

Once you have found the book of interest, take a few minutes and scan the introduction, foreward, and the table of contents. Once you look that this, you should be able to get a good idea if the book covers your area of need. Also, you may want to spend a few minutes just scanning the book shelves. There may be other very good resources right beside that one book you just picked up. Try scanning the same shelf and the shelves above and below it. You never know!

You might think of call numbers as a fancy parking spot. Everything in the library as an assigned parking spot so people know where to find it all the time. Library resources are essentially organized by subject (similar to Subject Headings). Since they are organized this way, you can also browse the shelves for other books or resources of the same subject. Each subject is assigned one or two letters of the alphabet. Moody Library uses the Library of Congress call number system instead of the Dewey Decimal system used in the public libraries. We do that because we have flexibility and specificity in assigning call numbers. Here's a brief explanation on call numbers. For a quick view of the what the major call numbers (major listings form A-Z), visit the HCU library organization page. The Library of Congress Classification Outline page goes into even more detail.

If you are still "scoping out" your topic (i.e., you still aren't sure about what to write about), then sometimes you can get fresh ideas by just walking the stacks. Check out the call number section for the subject of interest, then look the the shelves and see what is out there.