Possible Problem:  Not Enough Results

Sometimes when we do a search in the Library Catalog on a specific topic, we get few or no results.  This is not necessarily because the library doesn’t have any books that cover the topic – it just means the library doesn’t have an ENTIRE book devoted to that topic.  We might have books with a CHAPTER on that topic, however.

Example:  A search in the library catalog on poodles gets no useful results.

Solution:  Be more general and broaden your search terms.  For my poodles search, I should try a search for books on dogs, because it is likely that a book on dogs will have a section on poodles.

Try a search yourself – open the Library Catalog in another window, then try searching for books on chicken pox.

Not very satisfying results, are they?  It’s hard to believe that the six NOVA libraries (including the Medical Education Campus Library!) don’t have a decent selection of books about chicken pox.  However, remember that the catalog is basically only searching for chicken pox in the title, author, publisher, and subject heading fields, so what this tells us is that we don’t have a book devoted entirely to chicken pox, such as The Dummies Guide to Chicken Pox or something like that.   

However, we might have books that have a section on chicken pox.  Those books might be about diseases that children get, or they might be books about skin diseases, or they might be related to children’s health.  So after determining that the chicken pox search didn’t get very good results, try using some of these other words instead:

-          children and diseases

-          children and health

-          skin diseases

You may have noticed in the examples above that I didn’t use a lot of words to express my topic – for example, I didn’t type in books about diseases that children get.  I just picked the most important words related to the topic.  Make sure you do the same thing when you search for books on your own topic.