Competency 6a: Building Block Search

Database: Academic Search Complete

Because the component facets have already been identified, identifying the terms for each facet was my second step.

Set 1: School library OR school media centers
Set 2: Academic achievement OR student learning OR academic success

Next, I truncated the terms library, centers, achievement, and learning to be able to retrieve all documents that included the different variations of the terms.

Revised Sets:

Set 1: School librar* OR school media center*
Set 2: Academic achieve* OR student learn* OR academic success


Using this method, I received 300 results. The article I retrieved was Valerie Edwards' 2008 "Making an Impact: The Pathway to Evidence." The abstract discusses how important school libraries are to students' learning and academic achievement.

Evaluation: Using the building block search strategy in the Academic Search Complete database was extremely easy. I was surprised by how many relevant hits I retrieved and can see that using the different truncated terms coupled with the OR Boolean term increased my recall. Overall, I feel that both this search strategy and database are useful and easy to use.