Digital History Guide for the IUP History Department

Welcome to the Digital History Guide for the IUP History Department.

**Helpful tips for reasearching **

As one is faced with the realities in College, it is known that some day students are assigned to write a paper. The objective of this site is to give some helpful tips to those researching while using search engines and the IUP library web site. Once one has a topic at hand, the next step is finding valid information to support ones arguement throughout the paper. We all know that typically it's appropriate to search for information in any type of book. Since we will assume, that we are all moder individuals, we know that the next step is finding sources for information online. Both search engines and the IUP library allow one to do this. These two are easily accessed and relatively simply to navigate through.

As we take a closer look at search engines, it is first important that one uses key words in reference to their topic. If this does not work try using less words and altering the meaning. Some times this can broaden your search, so that other correlated sites appear and give you more of a focused direction for your arguement. The first time that most people advance for information is normally google. Although, if you find that google is not helping you there are other search engines for example: bing, yahoo, ask jeeves, AOL search, altavista, looksmart, netscape and more. So, do not feel that just because there is little information covered in one search engine that there are hundreds of others that could be of use to you. Searching for good quality sources is just a matter of your time. Once a web site has been found with good relevance to your topic to support your arguement, it is time to read and evaluate whether the information will actually be a good contribution to your paper.

A good start to this is looking for the author, title, last updated, and to find the sources supporting the sites content. This may be difficult to find, but just because not all of that is there; it does not mean that the information is not completely credible. Then your job next is to see how much of the site is opinionated and who the authors audience is. This will help you understand the main points and objective of the content in the site to better differientiate for useful information.

Another tool for researching could be to try the iup library website. When doing this you should consider all of your options. Here you can look for articles, books, and web content. The idea here is that there is some scholary information that your school may have that is valuable to you that the world wide web does not using search engines. When researching for articles there are a few ideas here first think of a few words to narrow your search. The reason for this is to find as much useful information as possible. The good thing about the library sites are that all information is crediable, so you do not have to worry about is this some one's opinion or is this a fact. Facts will be one this site when you do find information. Another nice aspect of using the library page is that you can find people dissertations. That means that there is possibly someone else who had scholary work on similar material that you are looking for. This could help you with ur arguement in a paper with seeing others ideas along with facts.

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