 Hi, this is Sherry Sains. I'm the Linguistic Subject Librarian here at Alden Library. I'd like to try to walk you through using the Thesaurus in LLBA. Boy, doesn't that sound like a mouthful? That's the subject indexing to the Linguistics database. This is going to be a little more advanced than just throwing keywords in a box. So I want to walk you through it step by step. It's a very powerful tool that will help you in advanced academic searching for your linguistic subjects. So I'm in Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts. I'm on the Advanced Search page, and I want to do some work with subject heading searching. To get to the correct subject headings, I need to use the Thesaurus. The Thesaurus is a list of words that are allowed and not allowed. As an analogy, let's look inside Facebook. So here's a photo I have uploaded to Facebook, and you can see that I've been tagged. That's me. When you go to tag me in Facebook, you start to type my name. This whole string of letters comes up because that's my official Facebook tag. And if you want to find me in Facebook, that's what you look for. That's what you get. You don't get Sains. You don't get SB Sains. You don't get SBS. You get Sherry Babcock Sains. That's my official term. Similarly, when I go to the Thesaurus in LLBA, and I do a search, for example, if I was doing secret language learning, I get the list of words they use and don't use. These are predetermined by indexers, by the people who sit down and add descriptions to LLBA. These are the words, a list of words that they're allowed to use. And they can't use other things. This is an agreement among indexers. So finding out what these things are for my topic is really going to help me. So I search on second language learning in the Thesaurus, and I get these lists, and I say, oh, yeah, there's my topic. Look, there's my topic. And I click on it. Notice when I click on it, this thing over here says explode. Explode means this term and all of the narrower terms underneath it. So what are they? They're going to find out by clicking on the term. So let's say, oh, look, broader terms, learning. That is certainly a broader term than second language learning, and I'm not interested in anything that broad. But these narrower terms, I might be interested in. If I am listed interested in all of the narrower terms, I leave the explode checked because that means this and all of these narrower terms. Be aware that if I do not click explode, I do not get these terms because if the article is about French as second language learning, it is tagged that way, and it does not also include the broader term. So we put the most specific Cesare's term on it possible. So let's see. Do I want all these things? I might be interested in this. This depends on the age. Well, I'm sort of interested in college students. And now I'm interested in English, second dialect, maybe not. No, I'm not interested in all of it. So I am not going to click the explode button. Another thing that Cesare's can do for me is can give me more ideas of terms to use. So that's what this yellow folder is. And this says, look, there's all these other things that are related. They're not broader necessarily or narrower, but they are related and you might want to think about it. So I say, okay, am I interested in all of these things? Fluency? Yeah, I'm interested in that. Maybe, like maybe, like maybe, okay, these are all things I might be interested. And if I'm interested, I click them. Now I have a set of things clicked that are specific subject terms and I combine them with or, which means any one of these is close enough to this piece of my topic that I accepted. So I add these to my search and then I search it. So you can see it has all those things I picked and it's searching them all at the same time and it gives me 51,706. That's way too much stuff. So I am going to go limit that by another part of my search. For example, I'm going to clear this form. I'm going to go to the Cesare's. I'm going to try. I'm going to see Chinese because I'm interested perhaps in dealing with Chinese students. And I say Chinese and I allow the explode. And I add it to my search and I search it. Added with or's. This is where it gets to be fun. I have 10,000 results here. I can go to recent searches and combine these sets in all different ways. I can come up here and I can say I want this too. And I must also have this set one and set to some of at least one of these and at least one of these. Now I'm doing English as a second language and Chinese students. So let's see what happens when I do that. And now I'm down to 1900 results. And because these are tied to tags that were added by indexers, these are going to be actually on my topic. Sometimes I wonder about this crazy librarians, but they're a precise and organized bunch. Tessara searching will really help you get at exactly what you want to find in the linguistics database. If you have any questions about this, which I expect you might, I'll be glad to help out. Drop me a line, come in and see me, use our chat box.