Here is a great way to use the QuickSearch tab found on the front page of Duke Libraries webpage. Because searches in that tab search a lot – journal databases, the catalog (books), and more, it is a great place to start. In particular, it is a great way to follow up on an article or post of general interest because QuickSearch tab allows you to find most everything on a particular topic. You can get a comprehensive view in one spot.
In this example, we can follow up on an NPR story that was posted and re-posted on Facebook. In the NPR story, psychologists performed a series of experiments on inattentional blindness arising from a police brutality case from the mid-1990’s. This is a great example for Quick Search because it covers academic research, a formal psychological theory, a book about the police trial and a current event found in newspapers.
In our first search – a search for officer “Kenneth Conley” – Quick Search returns over 200 hits, mostly newspaper articles. A search for “inattentional blindness” returns almost one thousand hits, most of which come from scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Vision or Consciousness and Cognition. (The psychologist’s study, published in the journal iPerception is also available through the QuickSearch tab.) You can also use the Quick Search tab to search for Boston Globe reporter Dick Lehr’s book on the Conley case. A search for “Dick Lehr” also returns over a thousand hits, but the very first one is Lehr’s book The Fence, which is about the Conley case. You can also immediately see that The Fence is in the collection at Perkins/Bostock!
The QuickSearch tab makes it easy to find more about various aspects of the original story with a few searches, zeroing in on what aspects interest you.