Religion 12: Accessing Information
Winter Study 2008

Keys to success in accessing information include:

Selecting appropriate investigative methods or information retrieval systems

For the assignments for this course, your investigative method will be a literature review. The library has a number of information retrieval systems (or databases) that can help you to find information on topics.

Constructing and refining search strategies

Before using the above databases, think about the words you will use in your searches. In most cases library databases do not work the same as Google. You need to parse out the most important words in your question (combine those words with AND in your database search) and synoyms or related words for each word (combine those words with OR). Be sure to read the database help to find other search tips such as the wildcard or truncation symbol (these symbols allow you to search for a root of a word and get words with any ending. For example, meditat* would find meditate, meditating, meditation, etc.)

Gathering and managing information

For larger projects you may want to consider using a bibliographic management software to keep track of the materials you have gathered and add notes about those items. The library subscribes to EndNote and RefWorks. See the citation tools page for more information.