COOL TIP! OK, you're in high school now, so we can let you in on a little secret....not ALL Google is bad! Google Scholar can help you find scholarly articles and books related to your topic that you can use for research. It's got the same little search box that you're used to, but it's capable of doing a whole lot more! Go ahead and try a search for "Voting Rights Act" in the search box below--then look what I can do when I go into the Advanced Search!
I've narrowed my search to include the exact phrase "Voting Rights Act" with at least one of the words, "suffrage". Then I selected to ONLY get back articles written between 1965-1975. Google Scholar still found 92 results--all of which would be really cool if I were doing research about the decade immediately following the Act! See, I'm sure you recognize this results page!
It's important that you try new things and new search tools, but Google Scholar can be helpful if you use it responsibly!
This is a searchable, online collection that is available to the public from the American Memory Project. You can search for keywords, or browse by author, title, or subject.
One thing that makes this searchable collection really cool is that you can link to real primary documents. Be sure to check out all of their links to additional resources, especially the image collection!
Discoverer on the Web
If you are lucky enough to have a school or public library with a subscription to this database, it is a great place for you to find journal articles, images, newspaper articles and more--all relevant to your topic! You can search for information in a number of ways, but I'm going to show you my three favorites.
Search by Topic
SIRS already has these great topics that you can click on for relevant information-it's perfect for finding information about the issues (like "Environment" or "Social Issues") or you can find out more about elections by clicking on "History & Government" and then picking "Elections". It really is that simple!
Search by "Keyword"
You've seen that list of keywords in the right hand column, right? I had to move them to the top of this page in order to show you these screenshots. Anyway, now you can put them to use! Just type one of them into the search box and see how many "hits" you get! You can sort the results by either relevance or date--I left mine at the default for relevance. Here you can see what my search for "Voting Rights Act" looked like:
And now you can see what kind of information it turned up!
Those little tabs at the top help you separate your results according to format, so if you're looking for journal articles, you'd click the first tab. There are also tabs for Newspapers, Magazines, Reference, Pictures, and Web Find Sites. Be sure to pay attention to the reading level--as a high school student, you should be challenging yourself beyond the easy mode!
Do an Advanced Search
By clicking on the Advance Search tab, you can narrow down your search results by date and reading level--you can even pick certain titles and/or authors. I did an advanced search and used two search boxes for "full text"--this means that the words I typed can be found anywhere in the full text of the article. I also narrowed my results down by picking "challenging" for a reading level! Here is what it looked like when I used "voting rights" and "minorities" for my keywords:
These results were much closer to what I was looking for!! Don't be afraid to try out different search techniques! While it's great to use the website's topic trees to get you started, you'll actually save time by narrowing down your results BEFORE you have to weed through several pages of hits!
Your library probably has an online "Card Catalog" that you've used before, but did you know that there is one HUGE online card catalog that shows what almost every library has? WorldCat is a great search tool that can help you find articles, videos, internet resources, books, etc. AND find out which libraries close to you have them! This is a beta version called "WorldCat Libraries" and it's open for everyone to search--just be sure to type in your zip code and it will let you know if any of your results are nearby! You can use any of the keywords I've shown you so far, but here is a sample search that I did for locating Internet resources.
This is the basic search screen, but I clicked on "Advanced" and then used "voting" for a keyword, "suffrage" for a subject, and limited my results to Internet resources. You can see below that I could have also narrowed itdown by date, author, or subject--the BEST part is being able to limit the format. You can find a lot of great DVD's here!
After Ihit "Search", I got a results page full of relevant information...see!
You can find a lot of great government documents searching this way...if you see purl.access in the url, you can probably link directly to the document!
My very first hit was this government document and I was able to download the pdf file...all 123 pages of it! When you're looking for primary documents, don't forget about WorldCat! Now, YOU can practice in the search box below!