Finding articles on Canadian topics in a Canadian periodicals index
August 20, 2012 | Ranald | Comments (0)
This index doesn't index only Canadian periodicals and, anyway, Canadian periodicals don't include only Canadian material. So finding articles on Canadian topics in it isn't as straightforward as you might think. But there is, with its curves, a way.
Say the topic you want current information on is health care.
To start, do a subject search. That is, click on the orange Subject Guide Search tab to get to the Subject Guide Search page. Do not click on (resist the blandishments of) the blue Subject tab to search from ("the comforts of") the Home Page. If you do search from the Home Page, you won't be able to limit the search results to Canadian material.
Enter "health care." Search Assist (as it's called) will produce, below the search window, a list of legitimate subject headings that you (knowing the laws of this index better) might have meant to enter. Obviously "health care," unknown to Search Assist, isn't, in this index, one of them.
Launch, blithely, your search anyway by clicking on the magnifying glass at the end of the search window.
"Medical care," your search results show you, is, in this index, the legitimate heading. Click on Medical Care.
Medical Care is shown seated on top, in glorious legitimacy, of Subdivisions and, below Subdivisions, Related Subjects. A subject dominion.
Click on Subdivisions, or on the green plus sign, to open the list of subject subdivisions. (You're almost there. Don't let your hand slip, nerveless, off the mouse.)
Select Locations from the "by subdivision" Topics drop-down menu. The default list of subdivisions is a list of topical subdivisions, hence the word Topics, though in this index genre headings like "Case studies" and "Personal narratives" count as topics (showing how shakey the underpinnings of legitmacry can sometimes be).
Scroll down the list of locations and click on Canada (566 articles on Aug. 16, 2012) or back up to British Columbia (51 articles) or down again, way down (the list is long), to Ontario (75 articles).
Yes, the list is long. It has about 175 locations. And Canadian ones aren't those with the largest number of articles. The United Kingdom has 903. The United States, 1069. These numbers hint at the amount of wading you'd have to do to find Canadian material if you didn't limit by location. (You'd give up. Your hand would slide, nerveless, off the mouse.)
