March 2008

Online Research When Google and Wikipedia Are Not Enough
by Heather Whipple
www.sondryfolk.net/hhw

After more than ten years behind the reference desk, Heather Whipple cannot stop informing strangers and annoying friends by constantly pointing out that "you might be able to get that from a library."

Why Bother?
I recently read an interview with a musician who said his brother kept editing his Wikipedia entry with false biographical details. The brother's intent was to amuse, but there would be no way for the casual fan to know what was fake and what wasn't (and I broke a cardinal rule of research by not making a note of where I read this, so I can't provide a source other than my own, likely faulty, recollection). This, in a nutshell, is the problem. There's nothing wrong with starting a search at Wikipedia, but take a look at the linked sources at the end of the articles and follow up to confirm what you've read if you're going to pass it on as accurate, unbiased, and/or reliable. And actually, this sort of friendly skepticism is useful for evaluating any source, regardless how prestigious its publisher or author may be.

I am a huge fan of Google and Wikipedia and use them all the time. My intent with this article is not to dissuade anyone from these resources but rather to encourage you to add some new tools to your research repertoire.

Ask a Librarian
No, really: ask one. The cranky-spinster stereotype may have some real-world examples, but most reference librarians choose this work because we like helping people find information. If the first librarian you try doesn't help, ask another one.

When I say "ask," I don't mean you have to go to the library or pick up the phone (not that there's anything wrong with that). Many public libraries have email reference service, and a growing number offer IM or chat reference. Find your local public library website and see what they offer. University and college libraries may be happy to help community members and alumni. You can even Ask a Librarian of Congress.

An increasing number of online-only groups of librarians offer research support. The Internet Public Library has a mission to "provide library services to Internet users...and direct assistance to individuals." Radical Reference is "a collective of volunteer library workers" that started as an information service for demonstrators and activists during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City and has evolved "to answer information needs from the general public, independent journalists, and activists." The online community Second Life has a full-service library with several specialty branches; visit the Info Island blog to learn more about what they're doing.

Sometimes You Feel Like a Book
If you need to confirm the title of an obscure video, find out if a nearby library owns a particular cd, see how many libraries have a copy of your book in their collection, or want to search thousands of public and university library catalogs around the world all at once, go to Worldcat. You can also set up your own account to store searches, create lists of titles, and export citations.

If it's only a few pages you want to read, try to search for them using amazon.com's "Search inside this book" or Google Book Search. Both have an archive of scanned images that cannot be comprehensively viewed, copied, or printed due to copyright and license agreements. However, it is sometimes possible to construct a search that brings up the page or two you want to see.

And Sometimes You Don't
Perhaps the most underutilized resources available from many public libraries are fulltext periodical article databases. Finding this content on the open Internet is very much a hit or miss effort, but tens of thousands of magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and academic publications can be read in full by folks with access to the subscriptions held by libraries. In many cases, you can connect to these databases from home by logging in with your library card number. The older the article you're looking for, the harder it will be to find it online, but the backlog is gradually getting digitized.

Several states have state-wide subscription agreements, so that even tiny libraries with tinier budgets can afford to offer such databases to their communities. The downside is that many of the databases have deeply stupid and uninformative names, like Infotrac, MAS Ultra, or Academic Search Premier. Luckily, the content makes up for it.

Traditional reference tomes are increasingly available as ebooks, again possibly available to you at home from your library's website. The online Oxford English Dictionary, the complete Encyclopedia Britannica (without ads), handbooks of this and encyclopedias of that: more and more of them are out there, just not by way of Yahoo Search or ask.com. The resources I've mentioned here are just a few examples, and more are showing up all the time. Find your library's website and see what's available; you may be pleasantly surprised.

More Internet, Please
Despite my compulsion to badger folks to use online resources from libraries, I still love the Internet. I love it more when I can draw on specialized search tools instead of always relying on Google. The Librarians' Internet Index is a searchable directory of annotated websites that has been actively maintained since the early 1990s, now a project of the Library of California. The Open Directory Project is an international volunteer effort to select, categorize, and organize websites by topic; like Wikipedia, anyone can sign up to edit the directory.

Highwire Press free fulltext articles and The The Directory of Open Access Journals provide search interfaces for finding scientific and scholarly research articles that are available online for free. Google Scholar can also identify academic articles, but many of its results will have fulltext links that require a subscription or a fee. In that case, check back with your library to see if you can get the article through their databases.

I hope your experience of the Internet is like mine, that the number of excellent, exciting, fun, useful websites you learn about is ever increasing (for example, if you haven't checked out the feminist science fiction wiki, take a look). It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the good stuff, and of course it's often well camouflaged by waves of the, shall I say, less good. Taking advantage of online services like Ask a Librarian or fulltext article databases can make your research process more efficient, leaving time for the really important things, like inter-species communication or personal growth and development. And, of course, your writing.