An introduction to smarter web searching.

1. Smarter (Re)Searching:
Tips, Tricks and Great Resources
Tutti Jackson, Project Curator
Ohio Historical Society

2. (Re)Searching Online
• There are an estimated one trillion Web pages*
• Visible Web (Good information vs. Good enough)
• Invisible Web (not indexed by Google)
*Kelly, Kevin. 2010. What technology wants. New York: Viking.

4. Myth of the Digital Native
• “Just because you’ve grown up searching things in
Google doesn’t mean you know how to use Google as
a good research tool.” Anthropologist Andrew Asher,
Bucknell University
What Students Don't Know, Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2011
ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) Project

5. Myth of the Digital Native
• They (college students) tended to overuse Google and
misuse scholarly databases
• preferred simple database searches
• The prevalence of Google in student research is well-
documented, but the Illinois researchers found
something they did not expect: students were not very
good at using Google. They were basically clueless
about the logic underlying how the search engine
organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the
students did not know how to build a search that
would return good sources.
What Students Don't Know, Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2011
ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) Project

6. Searching: Where to Begin

7. Reality Check

8. Reality Check
Using Wikipedia Responsibly
• Understand what it is and how it works
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
• Look (critically) at the citations
• Links to more information?
• Caveat: Don’t cite Wikipedia. Seriously.

9. Images on Wikipedia
• Is the image a primary source?
How can I find it, use it and cite it?
• Wikipedia relies on public domain images, many from
national archival collections already available to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain
_image_resources
• Although public domain images can be used, you still
need to cite the repository.
(*Hint: It’s not Wikipedia.com!)

10. Wikipedia

11. Great Resources
National Archives and Records Administration
ARC – Archival Research Catalog
http://arcweb.archives.gov/arc/action/BasicSearchForm
Online Public Access – New Integrated Search Interface
http://www.archives.gov/research/search/
Library of Congress
American Memory
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Smithsonian Institution
Collections Search Center
http://collections.si.edu/search/

12. Questions?