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Franklin update: Keyword searching hints for finding titles in series

By Russ Chenoweth

Many scholarly monographs in all fields are published as titles in a numbered series. Series may be sponsored by publishers, national associations, research centers, university schools and departments, and other organizations. Titles in a series generally receive full cataloging in Franklin, the Penn Library's online catalog, and can be searched by author, title, and subject. Frequently, however, these works are cited in literature and referred to in lectures and conversation by their brief series title and number.

In searching Franklin, researchers are sometimes frustrated by an abbreviated citation to a work in a numbered series, such as "Annals 502." A Franklin title search for t=annals 502 yields "No Entries Found," yet there is such a work in the Library's collection. Its full series title is "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v. 502." Unfortunately, a title search t=annals of the american acad doesn't work well either; that search pulls up 155 works, arranged in alphabetical order by title, with no indication of volume number.

A keyword search that combines a few words from the series title with the volume number, using the "same" operator, solves these difficulties easily. The "same" operator requires that the search terms must be in the same "field," in this case the series title. For example, k=annals same 502 finds the "Annals" volume mentioned above-a monograph by David Wilson, titled Universities and the military. Likewise, k=acs same 445 finds volume 445 of the American Chemical Society's "ACS symposium series," an edited collection with the volume title, Biological trace element research. The search k=spie same 1007 finds "Proceedings/SPIE-the International Society for Optical Engineering; v. 1007," with the volume title, Mobile robots III. A search for k=aip same 213 finds "AIP Conference Proceedings, no. 213. "

In many cases the "and" operator will work as well as "same" for these searches. In others it will produce too large a result. Unlike "same," "and" requires only that all search terms be present somewhere in the same bibliographic record, not necessarily in the same field. The search k=annals and 502 finds Universities and the military and two other "Annals" titles which happen to have 502 pages. A search for k=acs and 10, however, finds more than 40 works. The search k=acs same 10 finds only those eight works in which "acs" and "10" are in the same field. One of these is "ACS symposium series, 10."

Sidebar: More on keywords

To find out more about keyword searching, take a look at the Franklin help screens-you can get to the first by keying the letter s and pressing <Enter>. If you'd like a copy of the "Franklin Keyword Quick Guide" or if you'd like to share your keyword success stories or frustrations, call Russ Chenoweth at 898-8118, or send e-mail to chenoweth@a1.relay. We'd like to hear from you.