Researching

Choosing the right tools and sources

When you are looking for information with which to answer an assignment question, you can choose from a number of tools and sources:

Tools

Library catalogues: these will allow you to find books and journals about your topic held by different libraries.

Databases or Periodical indexes: these help you find specific journal articles written about your topic.

Web search engines: search engines and other Web discovery tools make it easy for you to find relevant materials on the World Wide Web.

Sources

Teaching staff: your lecturer is often the best person to consult if you are looking for information. However, he or she will probably expect you to have a go first before asking for help.

Librarians: librarians and other information professionals who can help you find information quickly.

Library catalogues

If you want to use books, paper copies of journals or audio-visual materials, then a library catalogue is usually the best tool. Online catalogues tell you whether an item is held by the library. They indicate the location of resources and whether or not they are available to be borrowed. Most library catalogues, including the CDU Library catalogue, will also tell you if a particular journal is available in full-text electronically.

Although journal articles are a useful source of current, authoritative information, they are not listed individually in library catalogues. An online catalogue will tell you if a particular journal is available at the library concerned, but it won't tell you the titles or authors of the individual articles in any particular volume. To find relevant articles, you need to make use of journal indexes in print or electronic form.

In this researching unit, we will explain how to use the CDU library catalogue in more detail.

Databases or Periodical Indexes

Periodical databases, also called journal databases, index journal articles. These databases are used to find periodical articles relevant to your topic. Some indexes just provide references or citations (ie bibliographical information): they tell you who wrote an article, what the article is called and (most importantly) where the article is published. Others include both citations and abstracts (these are brief summaries of what’s contained in each journal article). Increasingly journal indexes are available in electronic form, and a number now provide a large proportion of full-text articles from the thousands of journals they index.

In workshop 2, we will investigate how to use these databases in more detail.

Internet

The World Wide Web is a gigantic library of documents stored electronically on computers located all over the world. The range of information available can vary from holiday snapshots to complete encyclopedias. There are three main types of tools you can use to find your way through the maze:

  1. Search engines: these provide an index to the contents of Web pages. Examples are Google and Web Wombat.
  2. Subject gateways and directories: these are more specialised Web indexes which arrange Web sites by subject area. There will be fewer hits produced, but directories are great for browsing general topics.
  3. Invisible web: is information that is not found by traditional search engines.

In workshop 3, we will investigate how to use the web in more detail.

Teaching staff

Your reading lists will probably include essential and suggested readings. Many of these essential and suggested readings are available for short term loans from the Short Term and E-Reserve Collections in the CDU Library. If what you need is not in your reading lists, then don't be afraid to approach your lecturer for advice.

Librarians

Ask at the CDU Library Information Desk. Library staff are expert at finding information and in assisting students with their enquiries. You can also contact the Liaison Librarian for your subject.

Summary

There are a number of different ways to find information. You can consult:

It's up to you which of these you choose to consult. Over the next three sessions we will look at how to use these tools to retrieve information.