How to locate research materials

[mooooom]

Two of my 10th graders hove chosen what I would consider really obscure subject matter for hsitory research papers and I'm wondering if anybody can give us good ideas on how to locate materials. I'm big on searching Amazon for books, but not sure that is going to work this time. Obviously we'll go to our library and use their search engines, but I don't have high hopes for finding sufficient materials there, but I do plan on using them for ILL, etc. once we locate materials. Are there online resources for searching for information locations?

[Nan in Mass]

Maybe you could use a college library? Have you asked your librarian? Often, they are trained in doing just this.

[KAR120C]

And if you can get the permissions, the universities frequently have online journal access (it might be restricted to students and staff, or it might be available to any library card holder...)

 

If it's a local topic, there might be a local museum that could give advice, or a local library with a special collection... And of course if it's local to somewhere else the same might be true at a greater distance.

 

We're doing a fair number of obscure-ish topics this year in history and science, and we always start with the wiki/google search (which I don't let him use as a reference -- it's just orientation), the libraries, the journal search, and then we start considering specialists. We have one topic that gets into old cold-war science research that required contact with the National Technical Information Service (a research lesson in itself!), one that involved the archaeologists from one of our local universities, and one that has already required local property records (another "lesson in itself"!) and will require the local history museum when we get to it. Right now I have him doing something that is almost entirely current news -- easy to do online, between streaming media and regular print sources, with plenty of commentary from all sides. It's feeling very different from the "thinner" history research... this one is almost too much information! :)

[Nan in Mass]

Would you be willing to elaborate on this? I am trying to figure out how to teach my son to do research. This isn't something I ever had to do for school, so I am finding it hard to teach. He is good GRIN at finding things on Youtube or Wiki, but...

[Nicole M]

University libraries have "research gateways" that give you access to online journals. JSTOR is one of the best for history topics. http://www.jstor.org/

 

My son has used this one, but gotten access through the college where I work or the community college where he is taking classes. I believe you can access many articles directly through their site, however.

[KAR120C]

Would you be willing to elaborate on this? I am trying to figure out how to teach my son to do research. This isn't something I ever had to do for school, so I am finding it hard to teach. He is good GRIN at finding things on Youtube or Wiki, but...

Nothing wrong with Youtube and Wiki to start with :) But what you get from those is on the same level with "my mom said" -- not citable, but gives you some good ideas of where to go looking. Basically, DS's job is to get from what he knows (even if it's just a word or two) to something that has a person behind it. Preferably a person that has some kind of track record -- a specialist in the field, if there is such a thing.

 

So his first step is the Google search and the Wikipedia entry. Sometimes that turns up links to useful stuff (journal articles are my favorite, which is where having access to the journal databases is excellent), and sometimes it turns up good search terms for a second round. If you don't have an association with a university, it might be worth it to drop by or call the nearest one, and ask their librarians what resources you could use and whether you can get a "townie" card (it's probably not called that... LOL) - giving you borrowing privileges and database access.

 

If you find journal articles, they cite other journal articles, which are then either further resources themselves or give you ideas of where else you can go with the topic. If you find a lot of opinions, you may have turned up a debate that you could look into. Sometimes that comes up in journal articles too -- in the letters that follow the publication of an article. And there are citation indexes (again, probably through a university) that can tell you what other articles have cited the one you already have, giving you both commentary and more recent works.

 

Last year our Lego team did research on poison ivy that turned up one specialist and all her articles, but also turned up a fairly heated debate carried out in published letters in the journal where her original research was printed... so from that we had a second specialist with a completely different analysis and conclusion to consider. Once you have a name you can frequently get articles from their personal website, which is often easier than the journal database searches...

 

DS always bookmarks every link he reads, just in case.... Sometimes things turn up later that ring a bell and it's nice to be able to go back and re-read something he had discarded early on.

 

Other than journals, there are interesting things turned up by talking to people who have some amateur or professional interest in the topic. DS is doing something with algae for his science fair project, and talked to his aquarium-keeping grandfather, a clerk in an aquarium store, and a garden store owner. Again, these are up there with "my mom said" but they do give you good hints. A few years ago he did a science fair project on bus-driving physics, and we happened upon a useful little event where the local public transit had invited bus companies to show off their latest models so the bus-riding public could come take a look and give their opinion on what would be a good addition to the fleet... And just by going to that, DS had several salesmen and some of the local bus drivers at his disposal for all manner of questions. That was sheer luck, but things like that do turn up in Google. If it hadn't worked out, another thing he turned up was a bus-testing institute of some kind that we could have emailed. Frequently, with obscure topics, you can turn up obscure organizations to go with them.

 

Sometimes the "obscure organizations" are actually government departments that you don't think about much... Anything that's public record, like land purchases and building permits, can be found either online (GIS databases) or in county offices. Lots of government research and governmental decisions (votes, laws, etc.) are available online or from government offices. If your topic has anything to do with something regulated, or something that would make it into the public records, the paper trail can probably be found. I've assigned a paper on a particular building of no particular importance (an old house on a friend's property) just to give DS some experience using the county records and talking to the local history museum experts. It's on hold right now because of other things he's doing, but we already know that the county records include the original land grant and all the building's additions, and I suspect the history museum will be able to tell him something about who the owners were and what they had to do with local events, and with a few hints in that direction he may turn up specific county records or newspaper articles related to those people.

 

Newspaper articles may be online or may be on microfilm in the library (that's one to ask your local reference desk!), depending on how old they are. Some other news sources can be found online too, like streaming audio or video.

 

And of course books -- we almost exclusively borrow library books rather than buying them, and interlibrary loan is an excellent thing for that... also the university libraries, which are more likely to have really obscure stuff. And sometimes you'll find that the professors of local university departments are a good guide to the collections... I remember ages and ages ago when DS had a question about the development of the alphabet (and wasn't really ready to do his own research!) I ended up emailing a linguistics professor, who recommended a book from the university library that he knew would answer the question very thoroughly.

 

So - first Google and Wiki, then journal articles, specialists and organizations, government departments and public records, news sources, and books. This is all stuff I didn't actually have to do until the last couple years of high school (and only a tiny bit then), and then much more in college, but there's nothing about it that's inaccessible to any age student who can write the paper that needs this level of information. For DS it's been all the way back through his science fair projects, much more than history papers - this is the first year we've applied this kind of research to his writing outside of science. But it's also one of those things that once you've done it, and learned how to do it easily, it simplifies so many other things. Writing more involved papers is a much easier process when you have a ton of material to refer to.

 

Next year I plan to expand into financial research -- stock reports and company records and whatnot. It's definitely a specialty area, but I think we're doing Economics for his social studies, so it fits. :)

[Nan in Mass]

Thank you very much. That was very helpful. The "Basically, DS's job is to get from what he knows (even if it's just a word or two) to something that has a person behind it. Preferably a person that has some kind of track record -- a specialist in the field, if there is such a thing." gives me an easy way to explain to my son what exactly he is supposed to be doing. He is curious enough about things that eventually I think we can probably do something like this. At the moment, he is mulling over how to figure out at what temperature hot a cotton ball burns and whether he can hold one. I think that is more of a measuring project than a research project, but those sorts of things crop up fairly frequently. Once he figures out how to find things out, it may be that he uses the various systems on his own. Hopefully, anyway. Did the poison ivy project involve whether eating the berries gives immunity?

-Nan

[stripe]

I would definitely seek out the librarians at your public library; if there is a dedicated young adult/teen librarian, s/he may be able to work specifically with your kids on their particular topic and suggest research sources for other projects, but any librarian is hopefully qualified and willing to assist. However, your public library may not have enough, so it's worth checking out an accessible college/university library. They may also have more money for databases, and may make them available to the general public if used physically at the library.

 

There are libraries that have websites with suggestions about how TO research. Just a few examples:

University of Minnesota

Research Help from Stanford

Berkeley

[KAR120C]

Thank you very much. That was very helpful. The "Basically, DS's job is to get from what he knows (even if it's just a word or two) to something that has a person behind it. Preferably a person that has some kind of track record -- a specialist in the field, if there is such a thing." gives me an easy way to explain to my son what exactly he is supposed to be doing. He is curious enough about things that eventually I think we can probably do something like this. At the moment, he is mulling over how to figure out at what temperature hot a cotton ball burns and whether he can hold one. I think that is more of a measuring project than a research project, but those sorts of things crop up fairly frequently. Once he figures out how to find things out, it may be that he uses the various systems on his own. Hopefully, anyway. Did the poison ivy project involve whether eating the berries gives immunity?

-Nan

They did turn up the berry thing -- that was quite a controversy among different writers -- but the Lego theme last year was "Climate Connections" and their poison ivy research ended up being primarily on how poison ivy grows bigger and more poisonous in environments with greater atmospheric CO2 (which had its own controversy between different poison ivy specialists with different research setups in different locations...) with a little side-bit on how goats aren't susceptible to the poison, and whether they could be used for poison-ivy-control.

 

For the cotton burning, it sounds like he could come up with some questions he needs answered -- how hot does cotton burn? how can you measure fire temperature? how hot can a person withstand holding without injury? For measuring the temperature he could consider things like whether any of the different types of traditional thermometer would be sufficient (or if it would be out of range), or if you could measure temperature at a distance and extrapolate mathematically, or if there's a more direct distant-measuring method... flame color, or infra-red radiation (you can get an IR thermometer from Radio Shack...) Google will give him some good ideas, the guys at Radio Shack might be helpful, he could look up things to do with house fires (how hot they burn, if there's anything to do with different materials starting fires -- the book Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind, not as a resource but just in terms of what temperature things burn at!)

 

Actually I just did a quick wander around Wikipedia starting with the book, through auto-ignition to combustion, and it looks like "combustion temperature" is a likely search term... or "flame temperature".... but that's the sort of thing he can learn to do himself -- start somewhere, see where it goes, and find a way through to useful sources.

[LibrarianMom]

I echo the advice of going to visit your local public library and your nearest college library. Even if you can't check out books, most likely you can use their journal databases which provide access to enormous amount of information. Even our fairly small college library has over 9,000 journals in full text.

 

For books, I would encourage you to take a look at worldcat.org. It is a freely available catalog that allows you to see what libraries nearest to you have a book available by entering your zip code. Pretty much any library that is fully automated includes their holdings. You can also set up your own account and make lists of books about particular topics or books you want to order. It is wonderful!