Current Biography Illustrated - Biographies of public figures, including musicians, 1940 to present.
Grove Music Online - includes The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz.
Articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers may be found in EBSCOhost Academic Search Premier and ProQuest. The Historical New York Times includes articles written during the lifetimes of many jazz greats.
The CBC Library Catalog contains many books on jazz musicians.
This is the first in a series of posts illustrating how to use our library databases, beginning with searching.
Choosing Keywords – starting with some background information we select words or phrases that commonly but uniquely represent our topic. After we run some basic searches in EBSCOhost or ProQuest the databases will suggest topics or subjects, allowing us to change our keywords to improve our search results. For instance, this CQ Researcher abstract has several keywords highlighted:
Weeks, Jennifer. "Factory Farms." CQ Researcher 17.2 (2007): 25-48. Are they the best way to feed the nation? Most U.S. meat, poultry, eggs and milk come from so-called factory farms or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), where thousands of animals are confined indoors. While they efficiently produce abundant supplies of affordable food, CAFOs also raise questions about animal welfare, public health and environmental degradation. Large livestock farms create huge quantities of animal waste, which produce noxious air emissions and contaminate water supplies when storage facilities leak or overflow. Overuse of antibiotics to keep animals healthy in crowded conditions helps generate drug-resistant bacteria and spread infections in humans. And many critics argue that long-term confinement in small enclosures or cages harms farm animals. Organic and free-range meat and eggs are increasingly popular, but they are more expensive than conventional meat and dairy products, and some organic suppliers are adopting industrial-style methods to keep up with demand. From the CQ Researcher. Reprinted with permission from CQ Press.
I picked words that I thought were specific enough to avoid many 'false hits' - articles that didn't have anything to do with my topic. For instance, I didn't pick 'animals' and 'indoors' since I don't want to read articles about the benefits/problems of keeping your pets inside.
Note that these are the concepts I selected; I could have chosen to focus on the use of antibiotics and the growth of resistant bacteria instead. Now I can take these keywords and group them into concept areas, maybe adding a few alternate keywords along the way:
Concept 1: factory farms, CAFOs, concentrated animal feeding operations, livestock
Concept 2: environment, waste (also pollution)
Truncation - most of our databases let you use the * (shift-8) character to take the place of any number of characters at the end of a word. This lets us capture various forms of a keyword without having to type them all in. For instance, farm* = farm, farming, farms, farmer, etc. Here are my keywords with truncation:
Concept 1: factory farm*, CAFO*, concentrated animal feeding operation*, livestock
Concept 2: environment*, waste, pollut*
I am careful about how closely I truncate my keywords - poll* = poll, polls, pollster as well as all the keywords I really want (pollut*=pollute, polluted, polluter, pollution).
Now that we have some keywords to work with we can construct searches.
In Searches 1 I used the CQ Researcher article 'Factory Farms' to develop and truncate keywords:
Concept 1: factory farm*, CAFO*, concentrated animal feeding operation*, livestock
Concept 2: environment*, waste, pollut*
- now I'll put them together into searches for EBSCOhost and ProQuest.
OR (Broadening the Search) - When more than one keyword represents a concept put the word ‘OR’ between them; this tells the database to retrieve any article with at least one of those keywords. For instance:
factory farm* OR concentrated animal feeding operation*
AND (Narrowing the Search) - With two concepts that together represent the topic, put together keywords for each concept with 'AND' between them; this tells the database to retrieve only articles that have both keywords. For instance:
factory farm* AND pollut*
Grouping - Most of our databases provide multiple lines to construct searches. Putting ‘factory farm* OR concentrated animal feeding operation*' on the first line, ‘waste or environment* or pollut*’ on the second line, and leaving ‘AND’ between the lines tells the database to search each concept separately and then narrow them together.
If we only have a single search line we accomplish the same thing by using parentheses - and in fact the databases will translate the search that way. Here is a link to this search in ProQuest:
(factory farm* or concentrated animal feeding operation*) AND (waste or environment* or pollut*)
And here is a link to the search in EBSCOhost:
(factory farm* or concentrated animal feeding operation*) AND (waste or environment* or pollut*)
Next we'll refine our search using the subjects in the databases that match our topic.
In Searches 2 I constructed searches with OR between my alternate keywords and different concepts grouped onto different lines, narrowed with AND between the lines.
My search in EBSCOhost: (factory farm* or concentrated animal feeding operation*) AND (waste or environment* or pollut*)
only produces a little over 125 results (less than 100 of them are full text). Some of them are very good, and that may be all I need, but they don't represent all of the articles available in EBSCOhost for my topic.
Adding subject terms to my search - If I take a look at the subjects offered to 'narrow' my results I can see ways to broaden my search instead.
Just adding 'or livestock' to my search, as "(factory farm* or concentrated animal feeding operation* or livestock) AND (waste or environment* or pollut*)" produces over 1200 full text or locally available articles.
Subject Searching - Another alternative is to take the best subject keywords and phrases and put them together into a subject search. For my first concept the best matches are: Animal feeding, Livestock, Livestock factories, Animal industry. 'Livestock' as a single keyword captures both of those two subject headings, but 'animal' is too broad so I will have to use both of those phrases. My second concept can stay the way it is - all of those keywords have matching subjects. So I am going to return to my search and retype the first line, and adjust the target of both lines from 'Select a field (optional)' which broadly searches the title, author, subjects and abstracts. Here is how that looks:
And here is the search with parentheses and the 'subject' tags: SU ( animal feeding or livestock or animal industry ) and SU ( environment* or pollution or waste ). If you click on the link to run it you will see there are over 350 full text articles.
