1. Internet Research Techniques Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 This is a segment of the draft version of a large syllabus. I need your feedback to improve it. There is a voice recorder capture your suggestions during the presentation.

2. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 2 Internet Research is part of a plan, not the whole plan Better to start with other primary sources –Teachers’ recommended references –Books and articles by recognized scholars –Popular books and articles by established writers Advantages of Internet as a source of supplementary material –May be only source for more recent material –Traditional bibliographic sources may lead to articles posted on the Internet.

3. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 3 Have students create a “Webography” as they begin a project Credibility is crucial when they use material from the Internet. There are lots of UFOs Have the students capture the URLs of their sources –Copy from the address bar into a document, or –Add the addresses to “favorites,” giving them meaningful names, and arrange them later Teachers should provide a standard format for bibliographic references to Internet sources

4. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 4 Organizing and Finding Material on the student’s computer Create subdirectories as needed for classes and papers Give long and meaningful names to your files Create Acrobat indexes of material you have captured to pdf If you must, use Word and Windows searches (see Archiving talk)

5. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 5 Searchable Sources: Books Learn about books of interest –Amazon descriptions and reviews –Library descriptions Locate books –Library catalogs SchoolPublic University and University Consortia Library of Congress –Amazon and other booksellers (ABE is good) Get books –Ask a librarian: school, county or university, about interlibrary loans –Buy books used from the Internet

6. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 6 Searchable Sources: Articles Naïve approach: just “Google it” –No quality control Use scholarly searches –Google scholar –University library catalogs of periodicals –Authors and articles from book bibliographies Getting the articles –Libraries often facilitate downloads of PDFs For free, or Through an institutional subscription to a service –Google the authors, search their websites –Photocopy or scan the articles in the library

7. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 7 Techniques for Google searches (stuff you probably already know) Enter the most selective keywords Use techniques from “Advanced Search” –Put key phrases within quotes: “Adam Smith” –Use “OR”: Smith OR Ricardo –Include words you don’t want prefixed with a minus sign: Economics Smith Ricardo -Marx

8. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 8 Capturing what is in the browser (useful stuff all of which you probably don’t know) To capture one page of a document –Cut and paste into Word, or –Save the page as html, to open in Word, or –Write to PDF using ScanSoft or Adobe Capturing a whole web site –Adobe Acrobat (Version 5 or 7 Professional) –Free Software Foundation’s WGET PDFs: just save as, using the Save icon Pictures – right click and save as

9. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 9 Converting to Word Word can directly open HTML documents For PDFs in text format –Copy and paste into Word, or –Save as rich text format (.rtf), open in Word, or –Use Adobe conversion software, or –Use Nuance conversion software, or For PDFs image format: use OCR software such as OmniPage to convert to Word

10. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 10 Plagiarism Defenses Eliminate students’ excuses –Teach them your school’s definition of plagiarism –Require the use of bibliographies Require that they adhere to a methodology –Ask for outlines in advance of the paper, and compare papers with outlines –Challenge unexpected vocabulary, structures and usages

11. Internet Research Techniques - Graham Seibert Copyright 2006 11 Conclusion Making effective use of the Internet is much more a matter of research technique than computer technique The technical challenge is indexing and managing the material you download from the Internet