Hints for successful searching

The first question to ask is: should I use the Web for this project or not? The Web is great for some topics, but is not a good place to find literary criticism, scholarly analysis of social issues, or the kind of broad overview written by a noted scholar that a really good specialized encyclopedia can provide.

In addition to its print resources, libraries often pay for resources that are accessed through the web; these aren't indexed in search engines. Some "free" sites for magazines and newspapers charge for using their archives; library databases offer them at no charge.

Consider these steps as you plan a search:

• Think about what you need and which key words might describe it.
  
• Think about what organizations or government entities might provide information on your topic.
  
• Use what you find to refine your search (such as the name of an organization or a government agency).
• Limit a search to a given domain by including it in your search statement. For example, autism site:.gov will search for autism on government Websites. Or use the various limit options available through an advanced search.
  
• Use selective directories if you have a broad topic. (Search engines work best for narrow topics or specific facts.)
  
• Use a library database for additional, high-quality material.

Use these strategies as you sort through your results:

• Shorten a URL to get to a root page by deleting everything after the first slash.
• Follow links to find out about the page's author or sponsoring agency.
• Examine the URL to see where it originated. For example, URLs containing .k12 are hosted at elementary and secondary schools, so may be intended for a young audience; those ending in .gov are government agencies, so tend to be "official" information. Domains may include information about what country the site is from: .au for Australia, .uk for United Kingdom, and so on.

Because there is such a wide variety of information from so many sources on the Web, it's extremely important to evaluate what you find using the same criteria you use for all your sources.

Ironically, Web sources that seem scholarly are quite often badly out of date. The Catholic Encyclopedia, for example, is a copy of a reference work pubished a hundred years ago. The library has the up-to-date 2002 edition in the reference collection, but had to pay rather a lot of money for it. The one that is free online is so old it's no longer under copyright. Unfortunately, though convenient, it's only useful if you want information about the Catholic church in 1907. A few things have changed since then.

Good sites for research

The following are useful for a wide variety of purposes.

Selective directories

Infomine - searchable directory of scholarly sources from the University of California
Librarians' Internet Index - annotated directory of interesting sites
Scirus - a search engine of articles and Web sites in the sciences
Scout Archives - maintained at the University of Wisconsin

Digital archives

American Memory - incredible digital collections from the Library of Congress
Avalon Project - primary documents on US diplomatic history
Electronic Text Center - digital books from the University of Virginia
Eurodocs - European primary documents

News sources

Google News - an automated news aggregator, interesting for English-language world reactions and breaking news
Kidon Media-Link - based in the Netherlands, a directory of worldwide news sources
NewsLink - a US-based news directory
The Big Project - a UK site for international perspectives
Technorati - a blog search tool

Images

Flickr Creative Commons - millions of searchable, copyrighted photos that can be reused under stated conditions.
Google Images - a search engine for image files. The copyright status of these photos is not generally obvious.
MorgueFile - a collection of free images for creative use.
World Images Kiosk - over 50,000 fine art images available for educational use from the California State University system.

Research

Google Scholar - attempts to index and link citations to scholarly work, primarily in the sciences; some of it is not full text, but includes links to text in our library's databases when available.

There's also a great deal of information available on the Web in the way of statistics, maps, and official documents. And each of the Web pages for majors includes recommend sites relevant to particular disciplines.

Many students turn to Wikipedia for background information because it's easy to use, it's vast, and it has become so popular its articles often turn up within the first few links of a Web search. For some topics, particularly in the realm of popular culture, the articles can be valuable. However, there are two things to bear in mind.

First, because authorship is not limited to experts, but is open to anyone, there are times the articles are written by enthusiastic but ignorant amateurs.

Second, because the articles can be changed by anyone, controversial articles are often altered to reflect a paricular perspective, whether for political or PR purposes, and there is a certain amount of vandalism. For an example, see the article on "wiki vandalism."

In general, Wikipedia may be helfpul if you're checking something that is "common knowledge" (facts available in multiple sources, such as dates and well-known historical events), or if you are looking for very current information about a topic in contemporary culture that isn't covered elsewhere.

However, it is not generally considered a solid source for most college-level research. Even its founder, Jimmy Wales, cautions students against using Wikipedia for research papers. He told a reporter, "If you are reading a novel that mentions the Battle of the Bulge, for instance, you could use Wikipedia to get a quick basic overview of the historical event to understand the context. But students writing a paper about the battle should hit the history books." The prestigious science journal, Nature, caused a stir when it published an analysis that claimed science articles in Wikipedia contained an average of four mistakes, whereas the Encylopaedia Britannica contained three - something Britannica hotly denied. Nevertheless, for college research you should go beyond general encyclopedias, whether online or in print.

If you'd like to know more about Wikipedia, check out interesting, in-depth articles published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Or for a politically-barbed, satirical take, see how it was covered by The Colbert Report.