Researching an Article  
    Part 2

Information Found (and Not Found) on the Web

The dream behind the creation of the Internet [is] the possibility of universal access in a digital age – where any author's work could be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. The experience of most people, however, is not that the Net contains great works and crucial research information. Instead most of what is there is perceived to be of low value.

The root of the problem is that authors and publishers cannot make a living by giving away their work.

Mark Stefik in "Trusted Systems", Scientific American, vol. 276, no. 3, March 1997.

How does information get onto the Web anyway? Until 1994 or 1995, most of the information on the internet (which then migrated to the Web) was posted by scientists, educators, students and the government. Since then, commercial use of the Web has exploded and so has the posting of hobby pages or personal home pages, many of which are posted by the same people who also use the Web for their work at universities or business enterprises.

Scholarly or informative material which might be useful to a researcher gets posted on the Web in a number of ways.

A lot of information is posted by educators as part of their teaching or sharing information with colleagues. An educator or student with an interest in sharing information may write an article and post it as part of his or her personal web site. Generally, these are unpublished articles – if an article is going to be or has been published in a scholarly journal, the journal may own the copyright and the author can't post it without permission. College professors also post information that they're using for a class. Sometimes if they've authored a textbook, you can find chapters or portions of chapters on a class web site.

College students and, increasingly, high school students post information about projects they've done for classes. If part of the assignment was designing a Website for the information, the information and the site may be quite sophisticated and useful.

Personal pages, pages that people post for their own personal satisfaction, can have surprising value. This includes hobby pages, home pages, "fan" pages and any other pages posted out of the goodness of someone's heart. The internet has traditionally been a place for people to share what they know with other interested people, without looking for personal gain. Though there's a lot of commercial activity on the Web now, the tradition of sharing continues among individuals.

There are some outstanding personal pages with good information on such things as astronomy, cooking, ethnic history, medical conditions, auto leasing, you name it. There are "fan" pages with volumes of information on someone's "favourite author" or "favourite movie star." A lot of these are frivolous, but many people are "fans" of classic authors like Edgar Allen Poe or Jane Austen and have posted terrific information about those people and their works.

Since the Web became a hot advertising and public relations medium, many businesses have established sites to promote their company and its products. These commercial sites provide a lot of good information, because it helps interest people in visiting their site and keeps them coming back. For example, some of the investment companies which sell mutual funds have a lot of general investor-education materials available at their sites, including interactive calculators for computing your retirement needs or college savings needs.

More and more magazines and newspapers are providing excerpts from their current and past issues online, and some magazines provide additional content related to the current issue which isn't in the print version. (Clever – when you buy the print version and find out there's more at the Web site, you have to go there, and then you get zapped with the advertising banners!) Ok, there's a pattern here. The commercial sites will post information that they think will enhance their online or real world business, build their public relations goodwill, or will draw people to the Web site where they can either make money from advertising or deliver another sales pitch for a product. It's usually pretty interesting stuff, because it's meant to be, and some of it can be useful to a researcher.

It's actually pretty amazing to see some of the huge commercial databases such as phone directories, yellow pages, business locators (complete with door to door directions), stock tickers, and news update services which are available free on the Web. Only time will tell if the companies providing those services feel they are getting enough "bang for the buck" to keep going – no one knows for sure if anybody is making a profit on the Web or getting enough PR value for what they're spending.

There's also a growing list of free e-zines and e-journals, which are published only online, and many of these have excellent information for research.

The government posts a large volume of information, some statistical, some educational or informative. One of government's most important functions is dissemination of information, and the Web has become a way to get information to those who need it – state and local governments, businesses, taxpayers, educators. The results of government-funded studies are increasingly disseminated via the Web as well as in print, and these are often a great source for research material. The National Park Service, Library of Congress and many other government agencies are using the Web both to fulfil the functions for which they were formed and to promote their agencies' work. For example, a quick search for John Wilkes Booth turns up several nice pages of information from the Park Service at Fords' Theater in Washington, D.C. This information is comparable in scope and reliability to the information you'd get at a library.

Nonprofit organizations provide information relevant to their key issues. Non-profits were slower than commercial ventures in upgrading technology and therefore slower to come online with information, but now there's a lot of good material being posted.

Full-text versions of works whose copyright has expired are being digitized and posted to the Web for public use by some libraries and academic institutions, and many are available online. Many of these are fiction, poetry, drama.

So what's missing? Why can it be so difficult to do comprehensive research on the Web? What's not on the Web – at least not for free – are most of the comprehensive reference works you'd find in a library reference room and nonfiction collection. Why? It costs publishers a lot of money to put together that information and they're in business to sell it – they have nothing else to sell. They're not in the same position as an investment company who can author and publish some free information about investing techniques and then make money by selling you a mutual fund. These book publishers are in the business of selling the information they write or compile and they're not about to give it away by posting it on the Web. The exceptions to this are some dictionaries, almanacs and other single-volume reference works that are easily digitized and where sales of the print product are not seen as threatened by the Web.

Things you're not likely to find on the Web for free:

• encyclopedias (the CD-ROM versions are selling too well)
• index and abstract services (very labour-intensive to produce but are essential to a scholarly researcher looking for journal articles and therefore very profitable to sell to libraries)
• books that are still under copyright
• full-text nonfiction books on scholarly topics
• most scholarly journal articles (this is changing)
• pre-1994 (pre-Web) magazine and newspaper articles (this may change)

If you look at the list of what's not on the Web, it covers about 90% of the contents of a college library's collection, both the reference and the circulating collection. It's apparent that researchers still have to spend a good portion of their research time in the library rather than on the Web.

Getting a Broad Overview of a Subject

In the library

To get a broad overview of a subject in the library, you'll read and browse general sources of information discovered using three strategies: reference room browsing, catalog browsing and shelf-browsing.

Let's say you're making your first trip to the library to get ideas for your research paper topic. You've probably thumbed through your course syllabus and course-pack, so you have some references to particular authors, issues or topics which will be covered.

Start in the reference room, with some general sources. For a literature course, you may be reading encyclopedia articles about various authors or looking at biographical dictionaries. For a history or science course, you'll be reading a general encyclopedia or a special subject encyclopedia. To find out what current issues are important in your subject, browse current periodicals. Ask the reference librarian for a recommendation of sources to use for general reading in your subject area.

Search the library's catalog after getting some advice about specific subject headings to use (see Searching the catalog by subject and keyword for details). Browse the list of books and materials held by the library within several different subject headings related to your course. Note how many items are held and whether they are look interesting to you. Are they general or specific? Are they current? Are there any periodicals listed? Are there interesting items other than books?

Look at the sub-categories used in the catalog. You can learn a lot about a subject simply by looking at how the it's broken down into sub-categories. This will show you what issues the experts who work in this field consider important enough to treat separately.

Last, take a trip to "the stacks" and browse the shelves in your subject area to see what titles are available. The shelf arrangement usually comes from either the Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress and will be somewhat different from the subject headings used in the library catalog. On the shelves, books with similar subjects should be located near each other. Use the call numbers of several of the books you found in the catalog to direct you to a particular shelf in the library. Look at the books around that book, even going into different call numbers. Pull some books off the shelf and look through the table of contents and index to get an idea of topics covered and how the topics are organized. Do a little skimming and look for interesting issues or ideas.

On the internet

To get a broad overview of a subject on the internet, browse the subject-classified "Web directories" such as Yahoo, BUBL and Magellan (see Links for Research -Web directories for links to these and others).

Note how the subject is broken down into subcategories, to see how information in that subject is organized and what some of the issues are. Be sure to spend some time following the links to examine the pages and sites which have been listed. Often, it is difficult to determine just how comprehensively a subject is covered by looking at the number of sites. Many thousands of Web pages have little actual content and are mainly links to other pages, which may be links to other pages, and so on "ad infinitum." Following the links through to actual pages is like browsing the library shelves and pulling books off the shelf to skim the contents.

Run a quick search using one of the search engines. Once you feel you're familiar enough with the subject that you've identified some key words or concepts, use them to do a test search to see what kind of result you get. Look at both the quantity and the quality of the first few pages of hits to get some idea of how easy or difficult it may be to research that subject in more depth on the internet if you choose it as your topic. (See Links for Research - Search Engines for links to a number of search engines.)

Finding Specific Information

In the library

Arrange a consultation with a reference librarian. Once you have done your general reading in a subject area and have chosen a topic for your paper, you need to do some in-depth reading to look for a focus. You need to become informed about the topic. A reference librarian, especially a subject specialist, can point you toward good reading materials, some of which may be reference materials and others of which can be checked out. The search strategy you follow at this stage can then be used for gathering information once you've formed a focus for your research.

Find out what specific subject headings pertain to your topic (there may be several), so you can search the library catalog effectively (see Searching the catalog by subject and keyword for details).

Ask the reference librarian to recommend journals or periodicals held in the library's collection which are likely to cover your topic the best. You can often use search syntax to restrict your search in a periodical index to certain journals. That way, the articles you find should be in your library's collection and available to you. If you don't find enough material, you may also want to search the periodical index without limiting it to journals in your library, then find out how to get copies of the articles you need.

Search one of the index tools to discover essays or other "less than book length" works on your topic which are included in collections but won't be catalogued individually in the library catalog. There are resources appropriate to specific subjects (i.e., history, literature, science).

Don't overlook non-book materials such as videos, CD-ROMs, films, audio tapes, maps, brochures. These items should be recorded in the library's online catalog.

On the internet

Ask your reference librarian how he/she would approach a search for your topic on the internet. Most reference librarians, especially subject specialists, have done a lot of internet research and may have a pretty good idea of how successful you'll be in researching your particular topic there.

Consult a subject-oriented directory on the internet. Now that you've zeroed on a specific topic, you can find out whether it falls in the categories identified by the people (like Yahoo) who classify sources on the internet. If your topic happens to fit neatly into one of the sub-categories used by a directory, you may be able to find links to information simply by browsing the directory.

Choose a search engine and make sure you know its search syntax (see Skills for Online Searching). Do a couple of quick, preliminary searches to test how easy or tough it's going to be to get quality information on your topic. Construct an appropriate search term or phrase and try it. Let the engine search the whole Web and see how many hits you get, then quickly scan the first few pages of hits. Try adjusting your search term using Boolean operators, synonyms or truncation and run it again – count the hits and look at the first few pages.

Evaluate your quick searches. If you get many thousands of hits with the terms you used, and the first few pages of hits have a lot of items unrelated to your topic, then look at the advanced search features of the engine you're using to see if you can focus the search better. In the search engines which also include subject classifications, you may be able to limit your search to a particular subject area. Review your search terms in light of the irrelevant hits to see if you can revise your search terms for a better result.

Redo your search until you've done the best you can. Then start browsing the pages of hits and following the interesting ones. Often if you can find at least one good page that's on point to your topic, it will contain some links to other, similar pages and you'll be off and running.

If you decide to switch search engines, remember to change syntax. Each search engine has its own syntax, so what worked in one won't necessarily work in the others (more details in Skills for Online Searching).

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