Part 7: Finding Resources on the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is an increasingly important source of information to complement what you find in books and journals. As it has grown, it has become easier to find lots of "stuff," and harder to find good information on the Web.
Keep one central fact in mind when searching for information on the WWW.
No one is in charge.
Anyone can put a homepage on the Web. They can move it, delete it, change it at any time. They can also say anything they want.
Looking carefully and critically
at the information you find is essential.
(This will be
discussed in Part 8)
Remember that the Libraries' sources covered up to this point are not part of the "open Web." You will not find very many scholarly articles, books, etc. using Web search engines. Use Web sources to supplement library sources, not to replace them.
To help you start searching, and to help you find good starting points for your searches, University Libraries staff maintain lists of information sources, called Web Subject Pages, linked to the University's curriculum. There are also links to Web Reference Tools which cross disciplines, providing information similar to that in the print reference collection - directories, statistical sources, dictionaries and encyclopedias, maps, etc. We suggest using them as starting points for your Web research.
Below are links to some of the Libraries' Web resource lists. Click to see them. Then use the back arrow on your browser to return to this lesson.
The main list of the Web Subject Pages, which serves as a table of contents.
A list of general interest news links from the Web Reference Tools.
An example of a Web Subject Page, this one for politics and law.