Skip to Main Content

Literacy Specialist Research Guide

Here you will find resources provided by Gottesman Libraries and beyond to support your research and learning in the literacy specialist courses. Resources designated (CU) are accessible online through Columbia University Libraries.

Search Tips

Picking Key Words

  1. Use your research questions to pick out essential keywords: see the Venn Diagram on joining topics into a research focus.
  2. Find related terms and synonyms for each concept in your research question. for example:

art museums 

  • Cultural heritage

  • Museums

  • Galleries

Constructing Searches

Most search engines, including Educat+ and CLIO, use standard search language and symbols to convey searches:

  1. Boolean operators connect your terms: AND connects different topics together, OR connects related terms within each topic, NOT removes that search term from results. See the example below.

  2. Quotations: using quotation marks allows you to search for an exact phrase i.e. "Teachers College" instead of 'Teachers' and 'College'.

  3. Parentheses: help group sets of terms to delineate relationships within the search.

  4. Question mark: a question mark in a search has a similar function to an asterisk, but for only one letter i.e. 'wom?n' will capture woman and women.

  5. Asterisks: adding an asterisk at the end of a word will capture related words with the same root or base, i.e. 'philosoph*' will capture philosophy, philosophical, philosopher etc.

Example Search

(“art museum*” OR museu* OR galler*) AND (hiring OR recruit*) AND (divers* OR DEAI OR DEI) AND (manage* OR executiv* OR leader*)

 

Lincoln School Of Teachers College. Summer Demonstration. Recreation Program. (1939). Historical Photographs of Teachers College. Courtesy of Gottesman Libraries.

Using Subject Headings

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Also referred to as LC Headings or simply Subject Headings, these are the official subject terms prescribed by the Library of Congress for the cataloging of books and are in use in essentially all academic libraries. You can search through all Library of Congress Subject Headings in pdf files or search the LC Authorities site.

Although technically a separate system, it is also helpful to look at the Library of Congress Classification Outline, which will help you understand the organization of The Gottesman Libraries Collection as it is the main way in which we organize our holdings.

When searching in the library catalogs, use the item’s subject headings (found on the item record page) to locate similar resources.

To find works pertaining to this topic, it may be useful to use some of the subject terms listed below when searching the online catalogs of libraries at Teachers College, Columbia University, and other institutions.

  • Literacy [LC149-LC160]
  • Literacy -- Study and teaching

Detroit Photographic Co. (ca. 1902) The Library of Congress, Washington. Washington D.C. United States, ca. 1902. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2008678216/.