Starting Places: Background Information

Finding info on the web--a few caveats

The Web can provide excellent starting places to do your research. But if you are only using Google and Wikipedia to find your information, you may not be finding all of the information that is available on your topic. Especially if you are being asked to do scholarly research.

Three very important facts to remember about information:

  1. Search Engines only retrieve a portion of the information available on the web. A lot of useful information is not freely available on the web. It is proprietary, meaning someone--an author, a publisher, or institution--owns the information.
  2. Not all digitized information is created equal
  3. Not all information has been digitized. There are still books in the Library. And other print and analog resources that do not exist on the Web.

Finding Background Information--Video