The Net is huge. Finding information in it can be frustrating as you try to sift through mountains of information, much of it irrelevant. The right search techniques, though, can help considerably.The basics are these:
- know what you want
- know when you are done
- know your resources
- know how to search
Seems simple enough, right? You just have to know things!
The first tip is the hardest to follow, because the whole reason why you are doing a search is because you don't know something. But often, people need only think a bit before they hit the search engine to see greatly improved results.
Let's work with an actual example. Let's say you read a sentence somewhere that mentions Anna Luther. She was Martin Luther's wife. The guy who started the Reformation. Lutherans? Yeah, good, now you remember! You decide you want to know more about her.
So you hit the ol' browser and you recall Dr. Roebuck's advice. Tip 1: know what you want.
Sure, easy! You know what you want. You want to know about Anna Luther. But what do you want to know? Um, . . . "more"?
Aha. See? It's trickier than it looks.
But not all that tricky. She was the wife of a famous man, so one obvious line of inquiry (you do remember that "historia" means "inquiry", don't you?) is her relationship with the reform movement and its leader. Was she on board with the whole Reformation thing? Did she disagree with Martin, or support him? Did she have her own reform agenda or did she adopt his? What was her role in the movement--organizer? Theoretician? None at all?
Or, you might pursue more personal questions. How did she and Martin meet? Did they have a romance? Did they have children? If so, what was the family life like?
Now you have a whole clutch of questions, any one of which might yield mountains of information (and others might lead down a blind alley). Now you know what you want to know. The list isn't complete, not by a long shot. Once you begin searching, you'll learn new things and will want to know "more" about those.
Which brings us to Tip 2: know when you're done.
One reason why folks feel overwhelmed by the Net is they don't know how to focus. They follow trail after trail until they're lost and exhausted. Their list of questions just keeps growing.
Let's say we wanted to focus on Anna's personal life. We'll encounter lots of interesting bits of information, but we'll either ignore those or we'll put down quick notes in a file labeled "for further research." I do this all the time: I use the Favorites (Bookmarks) function on my browser (or start a separate word processing document). I learned how to make new folders, so I make one called Anna Luther and I make another inside it called Sidetracks. That's so I don't get . . . ah . . . sidetracked.
So, you begin your search with a list of fairly specific questions. When you've answered those, you're done. Along the way you will probably accumulate a number of sidetracks that might turn out to be more interesting than your original questions, but at least you have your focus. You will know when you are done and you will know when you are starting a new line of inquiry.
(Aside: this is actually no more than basic historical research methods, fitted out in more modern garb)
Tip 3 says "know your resources". What does that mean?
This is rather a complex topic and I'm going to oversimplify terribly. You need to know where resources are located and you need to know the types of resources available.
Where is fairly simple. There's the library, people, and the Internet. Each of these have particular strengths and limitations that you will do well to learn. Types are usually divided into primary sources and secondary sources; that is, primary are things written by people who lived at the time (even if only approximately); secondary sources are things written by modern scholars. Among secondary sources we usually distinguish between journal articles and monographs (books).
While the traditional scholar in me wants you to begin at the Library, I am coming to believe the Net can be worked into a good research strategy. So, with some trepidation, I'll say: start with the Net. You can get some quick answers there and at least refine your list of questions somewhat. I'll talk about Net search strategies a little later.
But your next stop should be the library. Even rather modest college libraries now have their catalogs online, so a Really Important Skill is for you to learn how to find libraries online and how to search their holdings. Once you find a book or article, you can get it quickly through Interlibrary Loan. You do not need physical access. I have bookmarks to a dozen or so libraries that I visit often. Between them, I have a virtual library of literally millions of books.
What about people? I put that in only so I can issue this warning. I get requests from people all the time asking this or that historical question. In the past, we historians were usually tickled when the general public asked us anything because it so rarely happened. Now that we are on the Net, we are deluged. As a general rule, we don't mind answering questions IF the questioner has made an appropriate effort to find the answer for himself.
When I get a question like "please tell me three reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. I need it by Friday, please" (this was a real email), then I get . . . ah . . . testy. So, if you want to find out about Anna Luther, do not simply find a professor somewhere on the Internet who has studied her and asking the professor to tell you all about it. As with much else in higher education, the point is not the answer the point is the search.
Tip 4. Now we finally get to it. After much verbiage, we finally get to talk about search engines and Boolean operators.
Just as you should develop a collection of online library catalogs you visit regularly, so you should collect a handful of search engines. Not all search sites are the same. They use different methods to collect their enormous databases and the more online searching you do, the more you should inform yourself about those differences.
I'm not going to go into those details here. Here you should only know that the same search string is going to yield different results at different search sites, so you can't really say you've looked thoroughly until you have checked at more than one. I use hotbot and dogpile most often, followed by AltaVista, Google, NorthernLights and Yahoo. Excite and Lycos form a kind of backup crew.
The key to good online searching is knowing how to form an effective search string (that is, what you type into the search field). You need to learn how to say: I want this, but I don't want that. For example, in searching for "cavaliers" I get thousands of hits on various high school sports teams. But I'm looking for something that is related to the English Civil War. So, I have to learn how to say "cavaliers AND English Civil War AND NOT football" or some such. The way you say that (called "syntax") at one search site will be different than at another. Visit the Help and Advanced Search options at each site to learn the details.
Finally, once you start following the search results, learn how to use all the features of your browser. Learn how to launch multiple instances of the browser so that you can follow one path while not losing your place (sort of the equivalent of keeping your thumb on one page of a book while you flip to another). Learn how to save URLs to a file, how to save pages, how to create and manage Favorites (Bookmarks). This is the difference between wandering aimlessly in the woods and setting out with a map and a notepad. Both might discover wonderful things, but only one will consistently find what she was searching for and be able to tell others what she found.
See "Doing History".