Ex Libris MELvyl Tells (EL Mel Tells)!

Volume 3, Number 2, March 2004

In this issue:

• Special Indexes

This month's contribution to El Mel Tells! was written by Aija Kanbergs, Program Coordinator at UC Berkeley' s Teaching Library. Aija has been working on reference desks since 1993, and involved in instruction via the Teaching Library since 1997. She admits she loves "figuring out the special features of catalogs and databases which allow us to find those elusive items."

Thank you, Aija!

Are there others of you interested in contributing your experiences using the Melvyl catalog? Contact Ellen Meltzer ellen.meltzer@ucop.edu, to see your name in print.

Special Indexes

Those special indexes: using author/title, keyword, notes field and more to maximize search results or to pull up very specific items Ever wonder how or why to use indexes such as author/title or keyword, or more exotic ones such as notes field or place of publication? Isn't author/title just plain obvious, and keyword too overwhelming? Not if you use a little ingenuity. Give some of these searches a try:

1. There's a book about Herman Melville by a young professor at Stanford in the 1960s, but all I can remember is that his first name was Bruce. What to do? Author/Title bruce melville and Year 1960-1970. Bingo! Three retrievals (two are the same item), and the book I want is clearly H. Bruce Franklin's Wake of the gods, published at Stanford in 1963.

   The author/title index is a keyword index, so you can use either first name or last name in your search, or both

2. I want to find books about the "founding fathers" of capitalism in the United States, the infamous robber barons. LC subject headings, alas, don't recognize this popular subject. Try this:

Keywords robber baron* words as phrase

Because the keyword index searches the notes field as well as title and subject heading, I get a nice retrieval that goes beyond the formal subject heading of Capitalists and financiers -- United States.
3. More notes field searching, this time in Advanced mode. I'm looking for an essay by Walter Benjamin, something about the work of art.

Personal author last name first benjamin, walter and Notes work art.

This retrieves Benjamin's book of essays, Illuminations. Click on the full display, and there's the essay, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction".
4. Needle in a haystack, or, finding a journal with a really common name. I'm looking for a history journal called, simply, Historia. I do happen to know that it was published in Chile. I can try browsing Journal title begins with, but I'll still have 46 items to look through. Let's try this:

Journal title (exact) historia
Place of publication chile

Now, I have just 5 titles to look through, and by process of elimination I can find my journal.