Competency #6a: Library Literature & Building Block Search Strategy

(Note: Below is a description of my Building Block Search Strategy. I have described each step; however, due to difficulties in moving images around in this blog site, I have only posted three of the pictures that represent the steps I took. You will only get see pictures of the combined search, the results of that, and the record that I found.)

I began by identifying my search facets:

S1=children or elementary or student*
S2=literacy or reading
S3=improvement or growth

Now, I am ready to conduct search 1 using the Advanced Search option.

Search 1: children or elementary or student* using “All Smart Search” yielded 32,575 records.
Search 2: literacy or reading yielded 14,714 records

Search 3: improvement or growth yielded 2,099 records

S1 + S2 + S3 yielded 53 records (see figure 1.1 and 1.2)

• See Figure 1.3 for an image of an article (i.e., record) that I found that fits my topic of interest.

Reflection: The positive side of doing Building Block search is that it makes you clearly think out your facets and the synonyms to those facets. However, I think it wasted time to go through and search each facet individually before putting them all together. In the future, I would definitely do the combined search but not the search for facet 1, then facet 2, then facet 3. I also found that quite a few of the 53 final results were not relevant.

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

Figure 1.3