Tuesday, September 16, 2014

context

Yesterday I asked for some sample search terms from my class in Biological Engineering.  My plan was to use their term as a thesaurus search in Engineering Village.  One student suggested 'cherry stoner'.  We tried that with no luck.  I asked the student if there was another term that he thought we could use.  We then tried 'cherry pitter' instead which was equally unsuccessful. 

Try, try again -  I thought we could search more broadly first and then move to more specific results after so we tried pitter and then stoner.  Context is everything in a search.  I hadn't intended on looking up information for the term stoner, but was very relieved that we were searching in Engineering Village and not in Google. 

It became the perfect opportunity to talk to the students about the benefits of using a highly specialized database.

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