Keywords

The Keywords function in Titles enables rapid searches for books that concern or contain specific topics or themes. Keywords are a categorizing or grouping mechanism to help you create lists of titles that are thematically-linked. For example, if you categorize Indigenous works with the keyword "Indigenous", you can then search on that keyword to yield a list of all your Indigenous books. Such lists can be useful when making funding applications, to provide lists to celebrate events such as Black History Month, or any time you want to create groups of related works.

Keyword Functionality and Tips

Functionality

• a Title record can handle an unlimited number of keywords – but don't go crazy
• enter one keyword per line; do not put multiple keywords into a single line, or you won't be able to search on individual words
• when you add a new keyword to a title, it also gets added to the full list of keywords available throughout PubGizmo
• the auto-complete feature when entering a keyword helps you select an existing keywords, instead of creating a variation; look carefully at the list before creating a new keyword that closely resembles an existing one.

Best Practices

• avoid punctuation in keyword/phrases
• avoid creating variations on the same keyword by adopting different spellings or using synonyms; for example, choose one of either "flight" or "aviation," not either, or both
• try to normalize your keywords so a single word or phrase encompasses variations; for example, you probably shouldn't create separate keywords for "Canada," "Canadian," and "Canadiana"
• a keyword can be a phrase, but keep it brief and not too specific
• don't collect multiple concepts into a single keyword, e.g., instead of "religious trauma", create two individual keywords: "religion" and "trauma"; that way you can search for "religion" and get all books that include the keyword "religion", search on "trauma" for all books on "trauma", or search on "religion trauma" to narrow your search only to books that contain both keywords
• don't include the book's genre, which has its own categorizer, as your keyword, or as part of your keyword/phrase, e.g., avoid a keyphrase like "feminist poetry"; instead, set the genre to "Poetry" and include the keyword "feminist" or "feminism" (choose one or the other) in your keywords; then you can search on both the genre and the keyword and get just those results.

Managing Keywords on a Title

Add a Keyword

To add keyword to a Title record, click into the field under Keywords where it says, "Add or Select Keyword...". A list of previously-entered keywords will appear; at this point you can:

• select the appropriate keyword
• start to type the keyword you want to "home in" on the one you want (helpful if your keyword list is long)
• type a new keyword.

Remove a Keyword

Click on the trash icon beside the keyword to remove it from this Title record. This removes it from the current Title only; the keyword remains in the system to be referenced later.

Searching for Titles with Keywords

Use the search box on Home, or at the top of the Titles module, to search for records that use the keyword or phrase. The field will auto-complete with a single known keywords, but you can do compound searches (which may take longer to execute) by entering multiple terms, as follows:

• to find all the titles that contain one or another keyword, use the word "OR" between the keywords; for example, to find all books that are either about religion or trauma, type "religion or trauma" in the search box
• to find all titles that contain all the keywords, enter them each separated by a space: to find all Indigenous books that are also about music (i.e., that have individual keywords "Indigenous" and "music"), type "Indigenous music" in the search box.

Managing Available Keywords in PubGizmo

You can view a list of all keywords that have been used by going to Admin > Keywords/Genres etc. > Keywords.

To remove a keyword so it long longer appears in the value list when adding to a Title record, click the trash can beside the keyword. However, deleting a keyword does not remove it from Titles where it already in use. To do that, you need to remove it from the Keywords portal on each Title record that uses it. You can find those by searching on the keyword in question.