Today I did a search using the library catalogue. I am very familiar with this searching tool as I usually begin my research for all my assignments using the library catalogue so I am feeling fairly confident beginning my search.
When I began to search I did not worry about selecting Kelvin Grove from the field where you can modify the location of the sources as I was fairly certain that the sources about inquiry were held at Kelvin Grove.
The first search stream that I type in was guided inquiry + early childhood. I was fairly certain that I would retrieve at least one useful hit but I was wrong. The only hit was a book called ‘Spotlight on Comprehension.’ Not really what I was looking for.
I broadened my search term by searching for guided inquiry + primary instead of early childhood. I was more confident with this search term as I thought there would be more sources addressing guided inquiry in primary settings but again I was wrong. The only source my term retrieved was the same book from my previous search.
Feeling quite fed up that I wasn’t finding anything I thought I would broaden my search term even further and search for guided inquiry. Surely I would retrieve something with this search term. However again I was proved wrong with the only relevant hit being our textbook which I already own.
I then decided to try searching for inquiry based learning + (early childhood) (primary) I used a Boolean Operator to combine early childhood and primary into the one search term in order to save time however no results were found using this term.
Finally as a final attempt I searched for inquiry based learning which resulted in 199 hits!!! In the library catalogue it breaks down the hits based on your search term into most relevant titles, highly relevant titles and very relevant titles. In the most relevant section there were 5 sources but none of these were relevant. Highly relevant had only 1 source and this was not relevant either. Just when I was about to give up I looked at the very relevant titles and many of these were useful sources! But then I looked at the availability and most of the books were borrowed out :-(. However there were 3 books that weren’t borrowed out that appeared to be relevant which I will borrow. These books were located at Kelvin Grove so my assumption about the books being located there was correct. This taught me that in the future I need to start my research much earlier!!
For my future searches I need to start combining my search terms by utilising Boolean Operators. An example of this is rather than searching for early childhood and primary in separate search terms I can combine them into the one search term which will reduce the time I spend searching.
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