Fall Leaves

Yesterday, a student asked if I thought Libraries were going to exist in the future. This query came up at the end of a Library Instruction class. An instruction session where I showed the very basics of searching in our catalog and one of the databases available. I laughed and said, yes, because Librarians know where the information is and how to find it.

Here's an example of why Librarians will be around in the future. As I drive to work, I am struck by the leaves that are beginning to change color, autumn is such an emotional transition between the heat of summer and the cold of winter. I want to find a poem that illustrates my feelings.

We'll use LION Literature Online which

is a full-text library of over 330,000 works of British and American poetry, drama and prose. In addition to literary texts, LION includes biographical sketches of major writers, selected author bibliographies, and critical and reference works.

A quick search for 'autumn' found 1546 poems. I looked on the main page for an advanced search or a search limiters page. It didn't jump out at me. I clicked on Text (under Search) and voila - there were the limiters. I want to find a poem about autumn, referring to fall colors, written in the latter half of the twentieth century. How do I limit my search?
I selected the Poetry tab
I clicked on "select from a list" for the First line/ Title Keywords
I noticed each word has a number next to it.
I selected 'autumn' (over 900). LION puts the word in quotes in the search box.
Back to the search page, I limited the publication date to 1950-2011
Searched.
Pulled up 537 titles.
We're getting closer to a reasonable number but still way to many.

Selected 'modify search' which kept the initial search terms. I added 'leaves' to the search box for keywords in the poem. 219 titles

Selected modify search and typed in 'color' for a keyword! That brought the number down to 20!

It is thought provoking to set a limiter on publishing between 1950 and 2011 but poems are pulled up by authors who died in the 1800's. Publishing date is the key here.

Back to modify search, scrolled down and noticed a limiter for additional poet details where I can put in the years the poet lived. I limited it to a poet living between 1920 and 2011 This time there were 19 titles.

I quickly found a poem that touched me - Autumn [from Carnival Evening (1998) , Norton ] by Linda Pastan.

Took about ten minutes to think through the search process, narrowing, refining, limiting, until I was able to put my hands on a manageable number of poems!

Yes, librarians will be around.

-kss

Your CTC campus librarian will give you the current password to GALILEO. CTC Library subscribes to LION just for our students.