Monday, 26 September 2011

Infotrac Excercise Lesson

I watched the tutorial video on how to use InfoTrac and quickly became aware of how to create advanced searches using key terms such as: names, places, studios, newspapers.
I learnt how to make more direct searches using other fields for search terms such as document types, article types and publication titles.
My first task was to search for "Kill Bill" with a second keyword as "Tarantino". Many magazine articles came up at first and I then learnt I could specify the content type to either: Magazine, Academic Journals, News and Audio.
My next task was to do another advanced search, but on Hugh Grant and then specify the result to NOT come up with "Four Weddings and a Funeral" using the drop down menu on the left hand side. I now know that specifying the options of "And, Or and Not" is called Boolean searching.
My third advanced search I had to conduct was "Ealing Studios" and "Michael Balcon", I then had to specify the publication title as "The Observer" newspaper.
My final search was to try another advanced search on "gangster" or "gangsters" and "film" or "films". I learnt that terms can be combined using the symbol '*' with the common part of the words. For example, I could type gangster* and film*.
Finally I made note of the fact that there are other ways of saving articles that I may find other than printing. I made note of being able to email articles to myself, downloading them to my documents, or using a USB stick. Audio files can also be downloaded as an MP3 file to listen to.

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