[CALIBK12] Biographies subject tag

[Judy Goetzl]

Part of teaching information literacy is to model an efficient search. If the final goal is to have the students pull up all the biographies in the entire collection and then scroll through the hundreds of hits, the student can simply but in "biography" as a general keyword. This will create a rich, perhaps overwhelming, list for them to peruse. In my own small library it brought up more than 70 pages of hits. 
On the other hand, this could also be the window of opportunity to teach them to be more specific. Model this broad search and then open one of the individual biographies brought up and show the students the actual subject heading (i.e. Baseball players - Biography or Babe Ruth). This would help them understand how to narrow their search target, how to structure their next query, and also encourage them to find a biography of personal interest to them. This would more realistically reflect what they would encounter in the public library and is what you would want them to be able to do for any type of future search, whether in a library catalog, Internet browser, online electronic resource, etc. (It would also save you entering each record to add the new tag since the more specific one has probably already been inserted in your MARC record.) 
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