Posted on Monday, October 4th, 2010 by Iris 6 Comments

Investments in the Term Economy

Search is all about term matching, and several times in the last couple of weeks I’ve had students

think there was nothing on their topics simply because we hadn’t found the right terms yet. Once

we’d dug enough to find some useful search terms, we uncovered previously hidden worlds of

scholarship which could in turn point us toward related works as we ruthlessly mined them for even

more terms, their bibliographies, and their “cited by” works.

Finding the right terms is hard. It takes empathy with the author, it takes some knowledge of

the field, it takes some knowledge of related fields (particularly if you’re in an interdisciplinary

database and can’t figure out why you’re getting chemistry results in your humanities search),

and it usually just plain takes reading. Reading carefully and with an eye toward learning

vocabulary. Reading lots. And there are very few shortcuts.

Searching sometimes feels like the modern way and browsing like the legacy way of doing research.

But in some sense, search is impossible without a hefty dose of browsing.