Library Literature/Books in Print competency

Library Literature/Books in Print Competency

Topic of Interest: archiving in academic librarianship

“naïve” question: What kind of information is available about archiving in academic librarianship, as this is the field I would like to work in someday?

I have a history background and would love to combine my two areas of study (history and librarianship) into a job, which means working in archiving in a special collections or university library.

Facets	Librarianship	Academic	Archives
My initial search terms	Library, librarian	School, university	Archives
Thesaurus	Libraries Library Service	Academic libraries	Archives

Boolean Logic statement (libraries or library service) and (academic libraries) and (archives)

Library Literature Database

SS1

1. Search Statement – Boolean logic statement
2. Results 268 records
3. Notes – there are too many results, using the “narrow by subject” search feature I narrow my results by electronic data archives/conservation restoration

SS2

1. Search statement – narrowed search results
2. Results 33 records
3. Notes – I look to see how many of these relate to what I am looking for, since my question is very generalized. I find an article I am interested in that explores the “significance” of what goes into preserved collections. It is titled “Building Collections for All Time: The Issue of Significance”

Books in print

There is no thesaurus tool in this database so I decided to use the original facets to begin my searching.

SS1

1. Search Statement( Subject-all) – archiving and academic and librarianship
2. Results 0 records
3. Notes - the words may be the problem here, I decide to use a variation of archiving and librarianship in order to see if my topic is even going to be in this database

SS2

1. Search Statement (subject - all)– archives and library
2. Results 151 records
3. Notes – this is too many records, I’d like to keep the number under 100, I decide to add a word from last weeks searching in order to see if this database will use similar search terms as the other

SS3

1. Search Statement (subject-all) – archives and library and collections
2. Results 7 records
3. Notes – this is a great number and I find a book I’m interested in from these results. It is a listing of articles about archiving and manuscript collections entitled “Articles Describing Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography”

I felt like I was able to find information easier for this competency, however I didn't feel that these databases held a lot of information for my topic of interest, last week I got thousands of results compared with this week where I got hundreds.