A couple comments on Bearcat Search following yesterday's training session:
1) Thanks to the to the Committee for all their effort and being able to explain things.
2) I think Bearcat Search's greatest value will not be so much as meta-search engine, but as a tool to expand student knowledge of the vast array of database resources available to them. It will help them identify which databases have greater coverage on their topics. Students can then go directly into the best databases and take advantage of the precision searching protocols that don't work in the federated search engine. Librarians should push this approach at the reference desk and in instruction sessions.
3) Based on what we saw in the hands on searching, I strongly suggest that we remove Lexis/Nexis from Bearcat Search because a) phrase searching with quotes doesn't work -- gave zero hits; b) searches seemed to default to the basic search mode which searched only two years back in the news library -- leaving out older records, and legal, business, and reference records) c) Lexis/Nexis has a limit on how many results can be retrieved (I think it's still 1,000 hits), which gives error message.
This creates a situation where students will too often get no results for L/N or incomplete information. I think it would be better to include Lexis/Nexis in the alphabetical list of databases with the notation that it is not included in Bearcat and a link to search the database directly, as we saw with the accounting database.
What do other people think?
Jerry
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3 comments:
Perhaps Jerry's suggestion is a good one for the time being. I'd like to hear from Serials Solutions about their take on LexisNexis and check with other libraries using 360 Search (that's the name of the Serials Solutions product we have) to see if they've found a way to get LexisNexis to work. Perhaps the new LexisNexis interface created problems that didn't used to be there. At any rate, given the popularity of LexisNexis on campus, I think we should do everything we can to find a way to eventually get it to work in Bearcat Search.
As far as teaching how and when to use Bearcat Search, I'll pitch in the way that Jerry suggests and, in the right situation, pitch it as a way to get started doing research. If you are a novice to a subject domain and need to fool around a bit to get a feel for your topic (background info, additional terminology, etc.), you might find yourself using Google to see what's out there; what you find in Google may end up including some sources that turn up in your bibliography. Other sources may just give you some more ideas.
In the same way, you might turn to Bearcat Search (search all the databases). You might see some keywords come up that help you refine your topic a bit, learn the names of some periodicals publishing articles on this topic, see which authors are writing on it, etc.
I agree with Jerry's and Stephen's comments about not including Lexis-Nexis in Bearcat search.
I would also like to suggest that perhaps we indicate any special date limitations of coverage on databases, such as JSTOR, which doesn't include the most recent five years. For example, if a student were researching the impact of Medicare on low income senior citizens and limited the search to the last two years, JSTOR would retrieve no results, which may lead students to think that this is not a good database to use for research on this topic. Although it doesn't have the most recent five years, it
does offer many articles on this topic.
As for teaching "Bearcat," I think a lot of the same things apply as to teaching any database. For example, when we talked with the marketing students, one wanted to search Merrill Lynch and strategy, and used a keyword search on Bearcat.
Lexis-Nexis didn't have any results as it shut off the search because too many results were retrieved. (It shuts down at 3,000.) When one searches the news on Lexis-Nexis for a keyword search Merrill Lynch and strategy and limits it to one year, there are still way too many results and the search stops.
But is this a surprise when one considers how many news sources are being searched, how many times the name Merrill Lynch would appear in an article about their own company's strategy, and since they are a major source of finance how many times they would be referenced in articles about other companies' strategy, as well as industry and governmental strategies relating to economic and other issues? One solution to recommend of course is to limit Merrill Lynch to a company search.
Rita
I have asked Serials Solutions if there is a way to increase the results retrieved by Lexis/Nexis.
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