Monday, October 29, 2007

Specifically nonspecific searching in ABI

Librarian Donna Slawsky pointed out an interesting search function in ABI Inform that allows you to search for articles related to companies without having to actually name one.

This comes in handy when a student asks: "I'm looking for case studies about how companies handle the training and development of their employees," but the student doesn't have a particular company they want to focus on.

Rather than just searching "training and development" by subject and wading through lots of theoretical articles about training and development, you can find articles about cases of actual training and development occuring in real companies.

Use ABI's classification codes to do this. The codes are toward the bottom of the search screen. To browse these codes, click on the hyperlink that says "Classification Codes." Next, drill-down to the section called "Document Treatment."

Here you can pick the classification code "Company Specific" (9110), as well as a number of other codes to help you get as specifically unspecific as your heart desires.

In any case, thanks to Donna for pointing this out.

1 comment:

Stephen Francoeur said...

Thanks for sharing that! I never thought to use classification codes that way in ABI/Inform Global(in fact, they had kind of fallen off my radar screen).