Using Alexander Street: Advanced
Watch this video to learn the advanced functionality of Alexander Street.
Welcome to this NYFA library video tutorial. In this video I’m going to be covering the more advanced functionality of the Alexander Street database.
So, much like in the basics video, I’m starting here at the kind of login page of the database. And from here, to access our screenplay collection, just go over here to My Collections and select Film Scripts Online. And when we get here, this time around instead of using just the search bar, I’m going to go ahead and utilize the Advanced Search options.
So, similar to the other databases, we are provided with a number of different ways to search the collection here. Various, you can still do a keyword search up here at the top for Words Anywhere. You can also do a search by Title, Director, Performers, various other things. Script Writer, you know, if you know the script writer. And, there are also a few options down here at the bottom, specifically, you know, dates to choose from. You can select or deselect any number of these options. You can set a publication date range. You can change the relevance of how you receive items from your search. And the other thing that is offered here is that not only can you type into these fields, but you can also select from terms that have already been applied in the database. This is the concept of controlled vocabulary, which I’ve discussed in a number of these videos at this point. So, you know, you can definitely feel free to type directly in, but, there is also some use to adding the terms that they’ve already designated in the database just to add a certain level of specificity to your search. So, for instance, if I knew that I was looking for a specific genre of films, I could select genre, and maybe just select out for comedy, for instance. You can also select more than one and it will populate those out in combination. But again, you can also add terms to these other fields as well. So, you know, if you want comedy and maybe, you would like to select a director from the dropdown as well, you can browse the selection here, especially, ya know, if you know somebody you’re looking for, to, this is incredibly useful, like if you know for a fact that you are looking for say, Charlie Chaplin films, selecting it from this dropdown is going to add that level of specificity to the search by using this authoritative version of Chaplin’s name. So, it’s actually probably a better idea to do this, especially as you start to add multiple terms, because you’re going to want that level of specificity.
Now, if I hit search, in this particular instance I receive nothing because I maybe got a little bit too specific. So, I’m gonna go ahead, I’m gonna head back to the top. I’m gonna go back to advanced search. And I think what I’m gonna go ahead and do for the purposes of demonstration, is I’m going to go ahead and choose that genre of comedy. Now you can see here, too, it’s already starting to tell you how many things within this collection of about 1000 screenplays match my description. So using just the term “comedy” in the Genre field comes back with 236 results. Now, of course, I can continue to add terms here to refine this result. But, if I click search, you’ll see I can also refine results further once I’ve generated this list. So, similar to in the other video, you see you can limit things down by decade of production, you can add more genre terms if you’d like. You can add performer notes, you know awards, various other ways to limit these things down, so, you know, with the intention here, as with our other databases of getting you to the information you need in a timely fashion. You don’t necessarily want to be sifting through hundreds of results. It’ll probably be more advantageous to you to hone in a little more accurately on what you’re looking for.
Now, clicking through to a record, I’m going to use this screenplay as an example, there are, of course, other ways to refine search and find items just directly through the items in the collection. So, the purpose of applying controlled vocabularies, aside from making it easier for you to search the database, is also to tie the records together, essentially, through the metadata that is added to these items. So, down here in the lower right-hand side, you can look up further details about what you’re looking at. You know, find copyright information, what company produced the film, Director notes, Formatting, Genres, all that kind of stuff. And that alone can be useful, right, if you see something in here like and you’d like to use that as a search term, you can of course copy and paste it out or select it from the dropdown in the Advanced Search page. The other thing that’s useful here, though, down at the bottom is this related items field. So, basically based off of the information that has been compiled on this particular screenplay, Alexander Street then can make recommendations to other screenplays that it thinks are similar in some regard. You know, Bad Day at Black Rock, for instance. Sealed Cargo. So, you know, you may also find results down here that are relevant to what you’re looking for. Or similar in some way that could be useful to you.
Now, of course, we have a record open and I can start to peruse this. There is a table of contents option over here as well. You can kinda go directly to specific scenes if you’d like. And also, if this is something you plan to use in a paper, or to reference somehow in a project, you’re gonna want to make sure that you cite your evidence for what you’re doing. Much like the EBSCO and JSTOR databases, Alexander Street makes this pretty straightforward. You’ll see right here at the top of the record that there is an option to cite. So if you click this it should give us a citation. You can choose which type of citation. Most of the things that you’ll be writing for NYFA will be in MLA format, so you can select MLA and it will go ahead and generate a citation for you that you can add to your Works Cited page. As with the other databases of course, and just the general advice from your library crew, these citations are usually pretty good, but of course, we highly recommend that you run them against your MLA style guide or speak with the Writing Center to make sure that your formatting is accurate and correct. Because this is something that you will probably be graded on as you go through.
So yeah, I think for the purposes of this demonstration that should about cover the more advanced search options. If you have any further questions about this, feel free to reach out to library staff and ask away!