Writing 120E: Language as Action

Shortening your keywords --  You can search words with a common root by "truncating" them with an *.

For example,

societ*  will search society, societies, societal, and so on.

Keeping words in phrases together -- It's important to keep words in phrases together to keep them in context.  For example,

"United States"

If you didn't use the quotation marks, Bridge would search these words separately.  In other words, you could get results for the United Nations and its member states.  If you include the quotation markes, you get results specifically about the United States.

Keywords are the critical words used to describe your topic in the literature.  For example:  Roman gods.  Notice -- the less important words like:  an, in, the, of  are left out of the statement.  Every word you ask for has to be present in the item you're retrieving, so just use the words you really need.

Subject links are provided by the Library of Congress cataloging librarians to describe your topic consistently.  For example, you might be interested in Roman gods but the most important work is titled, "The Divine Pantheon"  which doesn't use any of the words you chose initially.

So, your best searching technique in library catalogs would be to:

1. Search using keywords to find at least one item of interest
2. Use the subject links at the bottom of the screen to find other items the Library of Congress librarians deemed to be about your topic even if the exact words weren't used in the title

When you use a huge catalog like World Cat, it's good to search using subject terms you identified in Bridge rather than by keyword.

SUBJECT LINK examples:

• Applied linguistics
• Oral communication
• Discourse analysis
• Interpersonal communications
• Sociolinguistics

Catalyst Advanced Search

BROWSING

LC Classification (how our library books are labeled)

Language
Linguistics (P1-P1091) - Level 2 Rolvaag