Carnegie Mellon Libraries:

How to Use Cameo

This is Computing Skills Workshop (CSW) tutorial, "Library Resources, Part 1."

Cameo is the online catalog that lists the books, journals, recordings, CD-ROMs, and other materials in Carnegie Mellon University library collections. Cameo shows what items are on the shelves, checked out, and on order.  Cameo does not list articles within the journals and magazines owned by the library. To learn how to find articles, see see the tutorial "How to Use Databases (and More)."

Starting a Search

First open a link to Cameo.

  1. Point your browser to the University Libraries' home page at http://www.library.cmu.edu.

  2. Choose Library Catalog: Cameo.

  3. Cameo opens to the “Simple Search of the Library Catalog” screen.


Keyword, Browse, or Exact Search?

The "Simple Search” screen gives you three options for searching Cameo. You need to select the type of search you want to conduct by clicking on one of the three buttons.

Now enter your search term(s) or phrase.  (Do not press “Return” at this point, or Cameo will assume that you want a “Word or Phrase” search.)

Search Field Options

To complete your search, you must select one of the field option buttons at the bottom of the “Simple Search” screen.

If you are looking for items related to a topic, choose the “Subject” button to search the subject headings field. Or choose the “Word or Phrase” button to conduct an unlimited search of all fields in the catalog record.

If you know the author or title of the item you are looking for, searching the "Author” or “Title” field is the most efficient way to find it. If you are looking for a book in a series (for example, IEEE Proceedings, or the Cambridge Translations Series), use the “Series” button. If you are looking for a specific periodical title (such as Newsweek or The Journal of Marketing), use the “Periodical Title” button.

The Author field

The “Author” field shows the person or organization responsible for the intellectual content of a work.

Sometimes the author is a person. If a book contains chapters written by different persons, the “Author” field normally lists an editor as the person responsible for compiling the work.

In a “Keyword” search, the author's names can be entered in any order. In a “Browse” or “Exact” search, the author's last name should be entered first.

Sometimes the author field will show an organization or conference instead of a person. For example, the International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems is the group responsible for the contents of a work and is therefore listed as the author.

The Title field

The “Title” field contains the name of a work. A few distinctive keywords from the title are often enough to find the item that you want. For example, to search for the Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Database Theory, you could enter the terms “conference” and “database theory.”

The Subject field

The “Subject” field in a library catalog record describes what the item is about.  When they catalog each item, librarians assign subject headings, to describe what the item is about in a standard way that is useful for searching.

If you can identify a good subject heading for a topic, you can easily find items about that topic in the library catalog. Here we will show you some good search strategies to use to find as many items as possible.


Topic Searching

In Cameo, it is easy to identify subject headings that are relevant to a topic.  Using subject headings will allow you to strengthen a topic search but you should not rely on subject headings alone when doing library research, for reasons that we will illustrate.

When you want to research a topic in Cameo:

We will demonstrate this successful strategy by example. Suppose you are doing library research about how the Vietnam War has been portrayed in films.

Start with a "Word or Phrase" Search

The “Word or Phrase” search in Cameo uses a wide-ranging method that searches all fields of the record, including titles and subject headings. It also searches tables of contents in books containing essays by different authors. The words you use to describe your topic can appear in any of these fields.

  1. Choose Keyword.
  2. Type "vietnam war and film." The system is not case sensitive, so there is no need to capitalize the phrase "vietnam war." Notice that you have to type "and" between concepts.
  3. Click "Word or Phrase."

This search retrieves about 20 records. Cameo displays the call numbers, titles, and authors for the records retrieved in a “Search Results” screen.

Evaluate Item Records

Always take time to look through the records you have retrieved, noting which ones appear to be most relevant.

Click “View” to look at the full record for an item. The full record contains additional useful information: subject headings, notes, location, call number, and availability.  You can mark records for later printing or e-mail by clicking the empty box on the “Search Results” list or in individual records.

At this point, since the “Word or Phrase” search found a number of relevant items, you may be tempted to stop searching. But unless you take a step further, you don't know whether you have found all the materials on this topic in the library--or if these are the ones most helpful to your research.

Notice that there are several subject headings related to Vietnam War and film in the records you have retrieved. You can use these subject headings to find additional items whose records may not contain the specific words that you entered for your search.

For example, view the record for From Hanoi to Hollywood: the Vietnam War in American film.

Use Hypertext Subject Headings

Because the subject headings in Cameo are hypertext links, you can click on the  subject heading and Cameo will do a search to retrieve all items in the catalog that  have the same subject heading.

  1. Look at the hypertext subject headings assigned to this book.

  2. Click on the subject heading most relevant to the topic. (In this case, choose “Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 - Motion pictures and the conflict.”)

Cameo retrieves about 11 records. All are relevant to the topic you are researching, and several of them are new results that you did not retrieve by "Word or Phrase." Is your subject heading search better than your original "Word or Phrase" search? Not necessarily. Each search yielded unique and relevant results that the other search missed.

Consider Tables of Contents

When you do a "Word or Phrase" search, be sure to look at the "Table of Contents" section of records such as Stanley Kubrick: Interviews.

This book is not primarily about Vietnam War films, so it was not given the subject heading "Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975 - Motion pictures and the conflict." The book contains an essay of interest for our topic, listed in the "Contents" field: "Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War," by Martha Duffy and Richard Schickel. Be sure to check "Contents" when you evaluate search results. Finding one important essay could give you the focus you need to zero-in on a research topic.

Be Flexible

Rarely will a single search give you all of the relevant records in the library catalog on a particular topic. When you search for a topic, it is always best to do more than one search--as we demonstrated--starting out with a “Word or Phrase” search, checking for related subject headings, and reading contents notes.

Keep in mind that subject headings are invented and assigned by human beings. They are not infallible tracking devices. The development of new subject headings does not always keep pace with the development of new topics or theories in various academic disciplines. For this reason, be aware of the kind of vocabulary used by authors in your subject area. A “Word or Phrase” search using those vocabulary terms might retrieve things that a subject heading search would miss.

Use a “Word or Phrase” search to start your research with the most wide-ranging kind of search, to search tables of contents (for essays in books, etc.), or to search for distinctive vocabulary terms used by authors in your subject area. Follow it up with a hypertext subject heading search to retrieve books that have been assigned a standardized subject heading that describes your  topic.


Wildcard and Truncation

You can search for possible variations of a keyword by using wildcard or truncation symbols.

The wildcard “?” represents any letter.  For example, to find records containing either the singular “woman” or plural “women,” you could use “wom?n” as one of your keywords.

The truncation symbol “$” at the end of a word allows you to find all words beginning with the letters to the left of the dollar sign. For example, to find records containing the words “modern,” “modernist” and “modernism,” you could use “modern$” as one of your keywords.


Operators

Operators (often called Boolean operators) are terms such as “and” or “or” that give special instructions for relating search terms to each other.

If you do not type an operator between words in your keyword search in Cameo, the default operator “same” will be used to perform the search.  The “same” operator searches for records in which all of your search words occur in the same field. The words do not need to occur next to one another or in the order that you  typed them. Your search results are identical no matter  whether you type “charles dickens” or “dickens charles.”

It is easy to rely on the default “same” when you are searching. You can often get a reasonable number of retrievals just by entering your keywords without even thinking about using operators. But sometimes you may want to make your search more precise or efficient by using other operators.

Here is a list of some other useful operators for searching the library catalog:

Operator

Example

Effect on Search

and

shakespeare and tempest

Both “shakespeare” and “tempest” must appear somewhere in the record

or

bolivia or colombia

Either “bolivia” or “colombia” must appear somewhere in the record.

not

carnegie not mellon

“carnegie” must appear in the record, but “mellon” will not.

adj

virtual adj reality

“virtual” must be adjacent to “reality” in the order typed.


Browsing

Another good way of searching Cameo is to browse an alphabetical list of  authors, titles, or subject headings or a numerical list of call numbers. Browsing can be useful to check the possible spellings of a word,  to help jog your memory of an author's name, or to scroll down all the subject headings that start with a particular word or phrase.

Using the Browsing Option

Imagine that you want to find publications by a Latin American artist/activist your professor mentioned in class. You remember that the artist's last name is something like Fusca or Fusco.

  1. Select the Browse button on the “Simple Search” screen.

  2. Type the beginning of the author's last name (try “Fusc”).

  3. Select the field that you want to browse (in this case, “Author”).

    The result is an alphabetical list of authors, beginning with the first author in the library catalog whose surname begins with the letters that you typed. Now that you see the list, the name Coco Fusco rings a bell.

  4. Click on the hypertext number in front of her name and the items are displayed as search results.


Search Limits

You already know that you can search various fields in Cameo, such as “Author” or “Title.”  Now we will show you how to use additional options to focus your search.  You can limit your search by language, item type (CD, book, video, etc.), or library (Hunt, Engineering and Science, Mellon, etc.). You may specify as many limits as you wish.

Using Search Limits

Imagine that you want to see if the library owns a CD recording of the Broadway musical Passion.  You do not recall who wrote the musical.

  1. Go to the opening screen of Cameo and click Complex Search. Type the word “passion” in the "title" search box.  Scroll down and click “Search Catalog”. This search retrieves about 267 items, every item with the word "passion" in the title.

  2. Click the “Go Back” button to return to the Complex Search screen and scroll down to the “Select Limiting Options” section.

  3. Pull down the “itemtype” menu and select CD. Click the “Search Catalog” button.

Your title search now retrieves 7 CDs that have the word "passion" in the title, including the CD you wanted to find.


Back to the beginning of How to Use Cameo.
Forward to How to Use Databases (and More).

 

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  June 20, 2002 -- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Services/csw2002.html
  Jean Alexander, Head of Hunt Reference, jeana@andrew.cmu.edu
  © 2002 Carnegie Mellon Libraries