INTRODUCTION

Finding useful information on the World Wide Web is easier than you might imagine. All you need to understand is how your browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc.) works, how to use search engines, how to find indexes of sites in the subjects of interest to you, how to keep up with new sites, and what to do when you run into unexpected snags. The latter will frequently occur because of the limitations of the Internet in its current form, limitations that seem to diminish every day.

The best way to develop the necessary searching skills, of course, is to spend hours banging on that mouse, learning from your mistakes. While there is no painless shortcut through this experience, the following suggestions may help make the process less painful.

Searchers using Netscape can use the Back button and the Go menu to return to this page after following one of the links in this introduction. Internet Explorer users can employ the Back and History buttons.

BROWSERS

The first step is to understand what all those buttons on your browser mean. If you are using Netscape Navigator 3.0, you can click on Help and click on Handbook when the Help menu appears. (If you are using Netscape Communicator 4.5 and higher, click Help and Help Contents). The Netscape Navigator Handbook includes a tutorial about using the browser and a helpful index. If you want to understand how to use bookmarks, for example, go to the index, click on B, and select from the options listed. Bookmarking your favorite sites and organizing them into folders is the most important function you need to know. Creating bookmarks and imposing order upon them allows you to control the Web, up to a point. You may also want to see Netscape Communicator Reference Library.

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, click Help and Contents and Index for details about using this browser. The Internet Explorer equivalent of bookmarks is Favorites. Microsoft also offers a tutorial about using the Web.

If you want to change your browser, you can go to such a site as Browsers.com and download another browser. Most are free for individual or educational use. Whenever you download anything from the Web and have difficulty retrieving it, consult the manual for your operating system, or call the help number for the system's manufacturer.

If you need definitions of terms such as browser, go to sites like Netdictionary or Net Lingo. These and similar sites explain most of the jargon you encounter in using the Web.

SEARCH ENGINES

Unless you have found a site through an index of sites or have been given its URL (Internet address), you may have to use a search engine or directory to find sites. New searchers may want to begin with Yahoo!, a directory which gathers useful sites into categories. You can begin to grasp the variety of types of information available on the Web by going to a broad Yahoo! category, selecting a more narrow category within it, and a more narrow one within that one, continuing this process while visiting several of the specific sites which appear.

After becoming familiar with the way Yahoo! organizes the sites it has chosen from among the millions available on the Web, you are ready to perform a search. Begin using such tools as Yahoo! with simple searches -- words, phrases, names -- and understand thoroughly how they work before attempting complicated searches. With a subject such as the Cold War, for example, go to Yahoo!, and select the broad category Social Science, the Yahoo! heading most likely to contain history and political science. In the box next to Search, select just this category, and enter cold war in the search box. (Most Web searching is not case sensitive.) You will then see the search results displayed.

Notice that Yahoo! provides a link to AltaVista, a search engine that indexes more sites than does Yahoo! If a Yahoo! search proves insufficient, clicking on AltaVista executes your original search in that search engine. Observe that you receive many more results and that while many of these Cold War sites are obviously interesting, many others are less useful. Whenever you ask a search engine to look for sites related to an academic subject, you will find publishers' advertisements, course syllabi, course descriptions from university catalogs, and possibly even term papers written by students.

The best way to eliminate unrelated hits is to understand how the search engine works. Every search engine will offer help screens explaining how to refine searches. Some search engines, such as AltaVista, require you to place quotation marks around a phrase so that the words are not searched for individually. Consulting the help screens is the best way to find out about such techniques.

AltaVista also offers an Advanced Text Search option in which Boolean terms (AND, OR, NOT) may be used. Let's say the aspect of the Cold War in which you are interested is how it affected Great Britain and particularly the part played by the double agent Kim Philby. In AltaVista's Advanced Text Search, you might enter the following search statement: "cold war" and "kim philby". (Remember that most web searching is not case sensitive.) The results will include not only useful, substantial sites, such as the Cold War International History Project, but less useful others, such as very brief information about a book dealing with the Eisenhower administration during this period.

Search engines index varying percentages of the contents of the Web. The one indexing more sites more thoroughly is HotBot. Its results for a Cold War search of English-language sites indicates its relative completeness. Again, consult the help screen to learn ways to modify a search.

Because finding too many, often useless, sites is a major problem with search engines, newer search engines such as Direct Hit and Google (becoming the most reliable search engine) try to limit the results to frequently accessed sites.

In addition to individual search engines/directories, there are search engines for searching more than one search engine at a time. For example, MetaCrawler searches AltaVista, Excite, Infoseek, PlanetSearch, and WebCrawler simultaneously and lets you choose whether to display the results by keywords or alphabetically.

MetaCrawler, like AltaVista, allows Boolean searching, but not all search engines do. The help screens will tell you when such is possible. If you need assistance understanding Boolean searching, the Brandeis University Libraries and the University of Pennsylvania Library provide Web guides.

There are many specialized search engines for finding foreign resources, including several French-language search engines like Ecila. There are many Spanish-language search engines and many other specialized search engines. The library of the University of California, Berkeley, offers tutorials for using specific search engines: AltaVista, Fast Search, Google, Infoseek, and Northern Light. Other sites explaining the effective use of search engines include Search Engine Showdown, perhaps the most comprehensive guide, Eight Internet Search Engines Compared, How to Use Web Search Engines, Internet Search Zone, Internet Searcher's Toolbox, and Bare Bones 101: A Basic Tutorial on Searching the Web. (Click here for additional search engine guides.)

SUBJECT INDEXES

There are indexes of sites for all academic and non-academic subjects, sometimes dozens of indexes for a particular subject. Many are compiled by professors, librarians, graduate students, undergraduates, and professionals. Some are intended to provide links only to a handful of useful sites; others try to be more comprehensive. Some indexes are updated weekly or monthly; some are not maintained. The less often an index of sites is updated, the more likely some of the links are no longer current.

Academic indexes of interest include

Anthropology Resources on the Internet

Art History Resources on the Web

Biology Links

ChemInfo

Classics Studies Web

WebEc

Tennessee Bob's Famous French Links

Horus' Web Links to History Resources

Latin American/Spanish Language Resources

Web Resources for Applied Linguistics and Language Learning

Literary Resources on the Net

Materials Organized by Mathematical Subject Classification

Labyrinth: A World Wide Web Server for Medieval Studies

Classical Music Resources

Philosophy at Large

Internet Pilot to Physics

Richard Kimber's Political Science Resources

Clinical Psychology Resources

New Scientist Keysites

Statistical Resources on the Web

The Quick Guide to the Web for Theatre History and Dramaturgy Students

Selected Women and Gender Resources on the World Wide Web

There are also multidisciplinary indexes. The WWW Virtual Library is perhaps the most extensive catalog of scholarly sites broken down by categories. Education Index, Infomine: Scholarly Internet Research Collections, and Voice of the Shuttle: Web Pages for Humanities Research are also excellent starting points for understanding what types of academic information are available on the Web.

FULL-TEXT RESOURCES

One of the many reasons for thoroughly understanding how to use the World Wide Web effectively is the increasing availability of full-text resources, including scholarly journals, popular magazines, newspapers, government documents, historical documents, literary works, and reference books.

Unfortunately, no single source lists all available full-text materials. There are, however, several lists of online periodicals. Because of the constantly changing nature of electronic resources, it is impossible for any index to be complete and up to date, but several resources are useful starting points. The University of Pennsylvania Library's index of electronic journals by category is one such source. MetaGrid provides links to international newspaper and magazine sites. Some newspapers such as The New York Times and The Times of London are free but require a brief registration.

Online publications vary widely in the availability of their contents free on the Web. Some provide all the contents for issues going back three or four years. Others offer only the contents of the latest issues. Some give only partial contents. Very few publications, such as Studies in Bibliography, provide free access to all issues. Most publishers of academic journals charge fees. For example, Project Muse offers the full text of over forty journals published by Johns Hopkins University Press, but this database is available only to institutions, such as the CUNY Graduate School Center, that subscribe to it. There are also several stimulating interactive electronic-only magazines such as Feed and Salon.

Relatively inexpensive fee-based full-text services for individuals include Northern Light Search (click the Power Search button and select Special Collection), UnCoverWeb, and Electric Library.

Just as thousands of publications of the United States government are available free to its citizens, more and more government information is available over the Internet. The Library of Congress' Thomas provides information on the activities of Congress, and the White House Briefing Room provides not only the texts of current Presidential documents but a variety of economic and social statistical resources. These are only two of dozens of useful governmental and statistical resources on the Web.

Historical documents are available from such sources as Fordham University's Internet History Sourcebooks Project and Brigham Young University Library's EuroDocs.

Mostly public-domain novels, short stories, poetry, and plays may be found through Project Gutenberg and the Online Books Page. Several sites offer the complete works of Shakespeare with a search engine for finding specific passages. One of the outstanding literary text sites is provided by the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. An increasing number of concordances are on the Web, such as that for Blake. Using this kind of site is good practice in discovering the virtues and complexities of frames. One of the most compelling full-text literary sites is the Jane Austen Information Page with numerous links to annotated and illustrated electronic editions of her works. Not all such literary sites are completely serious, as with this annotated edition of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The text of a some reference works, such as The Motion Picture Guide and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, are available for free. Numerous encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other reference resources are available only as Web sites.

LIBRARIES

The Web makes it easy to search libraries' online catalogs. Libweb provides links to the catalogs of libraries throughout the world. The Library of Congress' Z39.50 Gateway offers easier searching of dozens of catalogs. There are also smaller groups of library links such as the Metropolitan New York Library Council's directory of library catalogs and Web sites in the New York City area.

OTHER USES OF THE WEB

An ever-increasing variety of types of information and services is available through the Web. You can purchase current books, for example, from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders, foreign books from such sources as the Internet Bookshop, rare books from Alibris, or textbooks from such companies as Varsity Books. There are even sites, such as Add All, for comparing prices at dozens of online stores.

You can find information about colleges and universities and their programs and faculty by visiting the institutions' home pages. Course syllabi are even available.

Locating people who share your interests and concerns is possible through discussion lists. Finding telephone numbers, home or office addresses, and e-mail addresses of individuals and businesses is relatively easy.

You can use interactive maps, find helpful information about many locations around the world, and even see live pictures of these places. Not only are weather reports available for places all around the world, but you can also find hotels and make reservations over the Web. You can even apply for a passport over the Internet. If you want to stay at home, you can find out what's going on culturally in your hometown.

Numerous Web sites have audio and video components, requiring you to download the necessary software if your browser or operating system does not include it. Such sites as Yahoo! Broadcast and Real Guide allow you to download the software and link you to sites employing this technology.

There are also sites linking you to Internet service providers.

KEEPING UP WITH THE WEB

Several sites offer annotated lists of what is new on the Web. Academic Info provides a constantly updated guide to newly discovered academic site, Digital Librarian offers a bi-weekly guide to new sites of interest, USA Today provides a daily list, and Yahoo! creates both daily and weekly guides. Each weekday, the Chronicle of Higher Education recommends an academic site. Stay Current in Cyberspace offers a lengthy list of sites for keeping up with new developments. Web searchers must use these and similar sites to keep up to date.

MORE TUTORIALS

There are many other explanations of the basics of Web searching, such as those from the Ithaca College Library, the Teaching Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and Web Search Strategies. The most thorough such tutorial may be Learn the Net, available in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish. Tutorials for specific academic subjects are available from the University of Bristol's Resource Discovery Network. Additional guidance is available from Find Tutorials.

MORE SITES

For access to many more sites like those in this introduction, visit the Mina Rees Library's Web Sites by Academic Discipline.

This introduction has been created by Dr. Michael Adams, associate professor, Mina Rees Library, City University of New York Graduate Center. If you have questions or suggestions for improving this site, contact him at 212-817-7055 or at madams@gc.cuny.edu.

This site was last updated September 12, 2000.