Rather than bothering with that many hits, I edited my query. I added LIBRAR* and SCHOOL not PUBLIC, limited the publishing dates to the last two years and US publications only. I had to switch to natural language to get any results and when I did, my results were down to 425 total.
I decided to focus on censorship of books specifically, so I added BOOK* not INTERNET to the list, this only helped me discard 67 of the 425 hits. Looking at my search parameters, it struck me that I should add parentheses to clarify my search.
My final search query was: CENSORSHIP and LIBRAR* and (SCHOOL not PUBLIC) and (BOOK* not INTERNET) in US publications over the last two years. My search query pulled 83 newspaper articles about book censorship in school libraries between 2007 and 2009.
My search finally landed me with the following article, which is what I was looking for, but didn't know it.
As I was putting this blog together, I realized I did not make a notation as to where this article fell in the 83 hits I found so I recreated the search. What I found was that the system now kicked back 84 hits, but this article is no longer listed, although is was in the first 25 hits (the first page) when I performed the search originally. I also notices the order of the hits is altered.
If I had to conduct this search in a controlled vocabulary, it would have taken much longer to find my article, however this database allows the option of using natural language. There aren't as many limiters and expanders as there are in some other search engines, but this could be a plus in that I did not have to make as many choices.
As I am looking at my final search query, I notice directions not to use "wildcard characters such as ! and *" which I did since I did not see this notice before. Wondering if it would change my results, I removed the * from my query and ironic thing is that instead of providing more results, which I expected, I received a message: No Documents Found.
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