Librarian's Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction

Updates the premier textbook for students and librarians needing to know the landscape of current databases and how to search them.

Librarians need to know of existing databases, and they must be able to teach search capabilities and strategies to library users. This practical guide introduces librarians to a broad spectrum of fee-based and freely available databases and explains how to teach them.

The updated 6th edition of this well-regarded text covers new databases on the market as well as updates to older databases. It also explains underlying information structures and demonstrates how to search most effectively. It introduces readers to several recent changes, such as the move away from metadata-based indexing to full text indexing by vendors covering newspaper content. Business databases receive greater emphasis.

As in the previous edition, this book takes a real-world approach, covering topics from basic and advanced search tools to online subject databases. Each chapter includes a thorough discussion, a recap, concrete examples, exercises, and points to consider, making it an ideal text for courses in database searching as well as a trustworthy professional resource.

• Helps librarians and students understand the latest developments in library databases
• Looks not only at textual databases but also numerical, image, video, and social media resources
• Includes changes and trends in database functionality since the 5th edition