1. I chose to research Native Americans in Minnesota and their connections to casinos. If I need to pick a specific tribe, it will be the Mdewakanton Sioux. I'm planning to just stick with any tribe in Minnesota because there are not many book options just about the Mdewakanton and casinos.
2. I found a book with general information about Indians in the upper Midwest and a more specific book on the Mdewakanton tribe and their casino.
3. The first search I did was "native Americans" which was way too broad. I then used the advanced search and searched "Indians" and "Minnesota" and came up with my first book that just has general information about Indian tribes in Minnesota. Then I searched 'indians" and "mdewakanton" and "casino" and came up with my second book. I was not successful on my first try because the search topic was way too broad and came up with over 2,000 books which is way too many to look through.
4. There were ebooks available for the search terms "indians" and "minnesota", but they were specific topics that I was not interested in. I would be interested in reading an EBook if there was a good one on my topic. I think it's easier to just have the book pop up on the computer then to have to write down the call number and go hunt through the library for it.
5. Not applicable.
6. I do have a mobile device where I could read an EBook- I did not since there was not one on the topic I wanted, but I have read articles on my Ipod touch before and it is different then a print book because its very small and you have to move the screen around a lot to see the whole thing. And when you turn pages it has to download it- it takes longer then turning the pages of a book.
7. I did keyword subject "minnesota indians" which came up with 185 titles. I then tried searching "minnesota casinos" and "indian casinos" and nothing came up. I didn't want to scroll through all 185 titles and didn't see any that were really what I was looking for on the first few pages. It was annoying that I couldn't do the advanced search to try and find all of those specific keywords or books that were closer to my topic. Overall I like the Miller Center OPAC better because it's search features have many more options.
Hi Kristi,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your OPAC search experience.
It sounds like you were able to locate some books on your topic. Try searching using the search string "Native Americans" and "Minnesota" and compare those results to what you found using the search string "Indians" and "Minnesota". Is there a difference? I look forward to hearing about what you discover!
Sincerely,
Professor Wexelbaum
Using Native Americans and Minnesota came up with 73 results and some of the books looked like something I would like to look at!
ReplyDeleteHooray! I had a feeling that would work.
ReplyDeleteAlways remember--there is more than one way to express a concept. This gives you a wide variety of keywords to use for searching.