bangersandmash

One of my favourite tricks for teaching students how to search the library catalogue is to prepare a list of common subject headings to help students begin navigating through a topic. The subject headings that I use are closely mapped to their essay topics so it is easy to raise the relevance of the session while also having a constructive conversation about headings in a discipline are constructed and how well these subject headings work for a given topic. Here is an example from a recent Canadian Politics class (the essay questions are not included. The student did have to do some intellectual work to figure out which headings went with which of the 50. In some cases an essay topic might require a student to use multiple headings, thus helping them to better understand the scope of their research)

The old catalogue interface supported this quite nicely. The result of a subject search was a list of subject headings that you could browse through. In the new interface the result of a subject search is a list of titles that contain the searched terms in their subject fields. One must click through the detailed record to see exactly what these headings are. There is no ability to browse the headings.

The new interface makes teaching subject searching more difficult because it lacks a browsing feature. I have to fall back on the techniques that I use for teaching subject searching in journal indexes but the two systems are not the same. Indexes usually have abstracts which tends to make them more forgiving when it comes to term selection. The catalogue lacks this nicety.

The new library catalogue interface brings a lot of nice features to the table but the loss of the ability to browse through subject heading hierarchies is a disappointment. I'm trying to figure out a way to use the subject facets to fulfill the same purpose but for now I am not sure that the impact will be the same. Being able to browse the headings allowed people to explore categories of information without being distracted by title lists. There was something powerful in being able to show students that knowledge could be organized and that the system of organization could help them build their understanding of the topic. I'm still not sure how I'm going to fill the void that's been left in my meagre repertoire.