Speaker 1: You are clear for launch, and with that, shut down your visors, O2 on, and prepare for ignition to O2. Copy that, and um... Hey, Mr. Ruschoff here. If you watched our last lesson, you now understand the different types of sources and how to evaluate their reliability and credibility. But where do you find the best sources? And that is the subject of this lesson, How You Find Sources. Now, it used to be that if you needed to find information for a research paper, you went to the library. After all, when I was in high school and college, there was no internet. All there was was the library. Now, oddly enough, the library is still a great place to find all sorts of information about your subject. And it can all be found in your school or your local library. In fact, some libraries even have special collections of primary sources that can only be found at that library. But one of the most overlooked resources in a library is the librarian. It might surprise you, but the librarian's job really isn't putting returned books back on shelves or telling people to hush. A librarian is an educated expert in finding information. So, if you're having a difficulty in finding good sources, or you don't want to have problems finding good sources, go ask a librarian. And if that library doesn't have a source physically at the library, keep in mind that many times a library can ask for that source from another library, what is known as the interlibrary loan. Another great reason to use a library is that they'll often have databases that you can access online, and that will be able to help you find a great deal of scholarly sources. In fact, let's look at our local college's library website to see how you could use a database. Let's say we're doing a paper on, say, the abolition of slavery in the United States. We're going to use this database. Now, first, what we're going to want to make sure we do is make sure that the full text option is selected. That way, we're only returned with those sources we actually can read the entire script. And next, what we want to do is make sure that we click on peer-reviewed to be able to focus on those scholarly sources that are so important. Then we'll type in our subject and hit search. Now, soon, what we're given is a list of over 800 scholarly sources. Now, you may not want to go through all of them, so we'll whittle down on them, and we're going to scroll down and look on the left side of the screen. And here, we can be able to further refine our search, and we'll start by looking for those papers written maybe the last 10 years. Okay, that now brings us to nearly 400 articles. So let's look at our filters, and we can see we can filter by subject. As we open up this option, we see a list of subjects. Click on, say, anti-slavery movements. Now we see that this has brought our list down to a manageable 18 sources. We can scroll down and look at the results, and if we see one that is of interest, click on that title and an information screen coming up, including the article's abstract. Now, an abstract is essentially a brief summary of the article to help you decide if the article might fit your needs. By the way, don't use the information you see from an abstract. You're going to want to be able to read the entire article to get the full context. Now, if by reading the abstract, this article, Tracing America's First Abolition, seems like it will help our paper, we can click on the PDF icon at the left, and we'll download that paper. Unfortunately, you have to be a student at Blend College and enter your Blend username and password, which I don't have. And this is usually the case for any of the databases you find at a college or a university library. Now, if you're not a student or a college or library, that's okay, because it's possible your high school might have a database through its own library system. So we're going to go to our own school's dashboard. We're going to find Library Services, and I'll click on Gale OneSource. This is a database that is used by school districts across the country. Now, Gale offers several different databases that are curated to grade level of the student. Academic OneFile is what we'll use. Now, once again, enter our subject and hit Enter. Now, we see there are over 9,000 different sources, including academic journals, newspaper articles, magazine articles, images, books, and even videos. Now, once again, we'll click that we only want peer-reviewed sources, and then we'll reduce the timeframe, so we're only going to search for maybe the last five years. And the number of sources goes down to 692. At this point, we could filter by subject like we did with the Blinn College website, but Gale has another way to do this visually. Go down, you'll see what is called Topic Finder, and click on the blue box. Here you will find two ways you can visualize all the topics included in your search results. Each method does the same thing, which is to group the results by a group and a subgroup of sources. So let's click on the orange block that says Americans. This brings up another block of subgroups and a list of 18 sources. We can click on one of these subgroups, say the one that says abolitionists, and that reduces it just down to five sources. And if you want to look at one of these sources, let's say the article that is titled The Transatlantic Roots of Irish American Anti-Abolitionism, go in and click on the title, and the information comes up. But more than just the article appears, you have information on the source, such as the author, the journal, and where the article was published. You also see how long it is, as well as its Lexile rating, which tells you how difficult it is to read. You can send the article to Google Drive by just clicking on the paper airplane icon. You also can download the article or print it. You can also click on the quotation marks, and Gale will actually provide you suggested citations in three different styles. We'll talk about citations a few lessons from now. Now, just above the text of the article, you'll see a speaker icon that says Listen. Click on Play, and it will read the text to you. You also have the option to highlight key text and make notes. Simply click and drag with your mouse on those areas that you want to be able to highlight, and when you release the mouse key, Gale is going to give you three options. The first option is if it's a word that you don't know, Gale will actually define it to you. The second option, you actually can highlight it in a series of different colors. And the third is you actually can take notes to annotate your paper. Now, you can review all the highlighted passages and associated notes by clicking on the highlighter icon at the top of the right screen. Click on the portion which says View All Highlights and Notes, and then you'll be brought to a page where all your notes and highlights are arranged on the screen. However, these are not saved. If you close your browser, they will go away. So before you leave this website, go to the top right and click on the Download button. It will automatically download a PDF version for you. So that gives you an idea of how at least two source databases work. Most work much in the same way. But what if you don't have access to a library database? Well, actually, we all have access to at least one important library resource, the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress is a resource library for the members of Congress, and it is the largest library in the world with over 168 million items. In fact, every day they add 15,000 more items. Unfortunately, unless you're in Congress, you can't check out any of these items. Now, you can go to Washington, D.C. and be able to go inside and look at them while you're there. All you need to do is demonstrate your research and apply for what is known as a reader's card. I actually did that for a paper I wrote during my first master's degree. However, you can access nearly 15 million of these items online. To do this, you're going to go to your internet browser and type in loc.gov. On the web page, you will see a search prompt that we can type in our topic and click on the magnifying glass, and over 3,500 different items are found for you. Now, one of the best uses of the Library of Congress is to find good primary sources. So let's scroll down and look at the bar on the left. Like the other databases, you can see you can be able to filter your source. Now, let's look at the dates, and we see that there are 29 sources between 1700 and 1799, the time that our nation was first being created, and we're going to pick on that. Now, what we find is the very first item is a public address from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, signed by B. Franklin. By the way, this is the same B. Franklin that helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin. Now, if you scroll down, you'll find that you actually have access to the collection of letters written by George Washington in his own hand. This is just a great example of the great primary resources that the Library of Congress can provide. Now, beyond the Library of Congress, you can also use what is known as Google Scholar. Google Scholar specifically is designed to search for scholarly resources, and we're going to go to the website, which is scholar.google.com. Now, Google Scholar looks pretty much like a regular Google site. You put in what you're searching for, you hit enter. But here's what I want you to do. I want you to put Abolition and Franklin. Now, the and is what we call a Boolean operator, and that tells Google to only bring back results that have both words in the record. I'll go over the useful operators in a few minutes. The search now returns over 100,000 articles, and unlike the databases we've seen before, you can only filter for the date of publication, but we're going to look at what we already have. The first record has the word citation in brackets. What this means is that Google Scholar found a source that fits your criteria, but doesn't have a link to it. But we can still use it. Look at the words in blue underneath the entry. The first thing you see is a star. The star is a report. If you click on this, it's going to save all the sources that you've clicked to what Google calls My Library. Now, how to get to your My Library is you go to the upper right part of the screen, and you're going to see My Library. When you click on it, Google will give you a screen showing all the sources you've saved from Google Scholar. This is a great tool to use when you're going through search results. Star each source that might be useful, and then you can go back and review them later to see which ones best fit your needs. Now, back to our search result. You can also get the source citation from different styles by clicking on the quotation marks. Now, next are the words cited by and a number. In this case, this means that there are 28 publications that have used this source in their work, and it basically references to them so you can be able to use this to be able to find other sources. Now, next is a link called Related Articles, which will bring up, again, a list of more similar sources. Now, last, you'll see the two arrows pointed to the right. Click on it, and it reveals a tool to do a library search. When you select this tool, you'll be brought to a website that has additional information about the source. But if you scroll down, you'll see the libraries closest to you that have this source. And if your source isn't listed, not a problem. Take that information to your library and see if they can request it for you. So let's go to our second source, and we'll open it up. You'll be brought to JSTOR's website. It has information about the journal as well as you'll be seeing a preview as you scroll down. Now, JSTOR allows you to read six articles online every month. However, if you use your limit or neither your school or you have an account, again, go to your library and see if they can request it for you. Now, Google Scholar also has books available as well, such as this one. As you open it up, you'll see that it gives you a preview for the book. It's not the entire book. You also can search for terms in that book on the left side of the screen. Now, if you believe that this would be a useful source, go click on the Get This Book In Print hyperlink to the left and click on Find Library. And once again, you'll scroll down and you'll see all of the libraries near you that have this book, including my own local library. Now, what is also nice about Google Scholar is that Google Scholar has many sources that have the full text online. Here's an example of one. Here, you can either read the entire article online or you can download a PDF version of it. Okay, so now you have some great resources to find those scholarly sources and those primary sources. But what if you're needing to find information to be found in the government or an inter-government organization such as the UN, or you're looking for news articles about a current event? Here's where you can use an internet engine such as Google. Now, you could simply enter your search terms and wait to the result, but the use of Boolean operators, we talked about those a few minutes ago, can really help you get exactly what you want. Now, I've always showed you one, the AND, and this tells Google only to bring back the results that have both words, but you also can use OR. For example, if I was doing research on, say, primates, you might type in monkey or apes. Google would then find any sources that had either one of these words and brings it so you can see. Now, you can also combine these terms using parentheses. For example, what if I want to search for information on giraffes and elephants in Kenya or Tanzania? Here, what I would do is I would put parentheses elephant or giraffe in parentheses and parentheses Kenya or Tanzania in parentheses. The parentheses help groups the terms to make sense logically. And once again, Google will do exactly what I asked it to do. But what if I was researching, say, jaguars? If I just search jaguar in Google, I'm going to find animals and I'm going to see cars. But what if I only wanted to talk about the cat? So what I'm going to do is after typing jaguar, I'm going to type the minus symbol and the word car and then space, I'm going to put minus the symbol and the word vehicle. Now, Google will only give me sources about jaguars that does not include the word car or vehicle, leaving me mostly with sources about the cat, which is exactly what I wanted. Now, if you know there's an organization that writes about your subject, you could also search for that organization. In this case, you would enter in the word site, add a colon, followed by the basic domain address of an organization. For example, let's say I'm interested in the economy of Peru. I also know that the organization OECD also tracks the economies of the countries in the world. So I will search Peru and economy site colon OECD org, and now I get back exactly the results I was looking for. Now I can go on and refine this further by just looking at the last year's results. In this case, what I'm going to do is I'm going to look just below the right portion of this toolbar and I'm going to click on tools. This opens up the option to search the results by date. Select the last year and hit enter. Now you have only the results from this past year. Last, if you're searching for news articles about your subject, above the search bar, there are tabs. Click on the one that states news and then put in your search item. You will only have news stories returned to you. And just like the previous example, you can sort by any type of date range. Now today, the combination of libraries and the internet makes researching projects easier than ever. And with the tips I pointed out in this lesson, you now know how to leverage these with great results. So good luck. And as always, keep on learning.