Using the techniques and information above, provide the following in a Google Doc:
1. Use the logic words, symbols, and other techniques explained below to create at least one search for reference books relevant to your research or course topic(s). (Hint: knowing what you do about the types of reference books usually being in their titles, use that to inform your search.) Write down what you searched for and any filters you used.
2. Identify two (2) reference books which are pertinent to a research topic you are interested in, and in a sentence or two explain why each one interests you.
Reference sources include a range of texts which tend to help you understand something much more quickly than you would otherwise. In your class, you work with primary and secondary sources for your assignments, and these add another degree of removal from some thing or phenomenon, being what are called tertiary sources. You can think of these resources as being more "processed" than the first two types, and as with foods, they're getting further away from the "raw material."
Encyclopedias are an example of a reference source. These give you a very general, bird's-eye view of a topic, intending to help you get up to speed quickly with basic information you need to know about it to have a basic understanding. Encyclopedias can have no particular focus and intend to capture a broad range of general topics of interest, or they can be more specific, for instance an encyclopedia of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome.
Dictionaries are another that you of course will have used, but probably one type of dictionary much more than the other kinds that would be helpful for understanding subject matter in your class. Like the linguistic dictionaries we tend to think of first, there are also disciplinary or subject dictionaries. These act something like the language dictionaries, but they "define" terms or proper names relevant to the discipline, subject, or topic. These are usually basically similar to encyclopedias for subject or topical areas.
Companions, handbooks, and guides (or guidebooks) tend to be collections of essays which will introduce topics with greater depth than encyclopedias and dictionaries entries can. These are usually written by scholars who have extensive knowledge of the topic and the various scholarly debates pertaining to it. The author may argue a thesis or in support of a particular position, but the idea is to do this while giving you a good sense of how that position or view fits into the larger context of scholarly debate. One particularly important part of these essays is their bibliography, which helps point you to other important sources in that scholarly area. (While one generally should avoid citing other types of reference sources, because these are scholarly essays, these can be good to engage with in research papers insofar as they are making an argument.)
Bibliographies and literature reviews are something like the companions, handbooks, and guides, except they're more like a big works cited or perhaps annotated bibliography than a scholarly essay. These are especially useful for very in-depth research, like the kind you might do for your senior thesis or other large scholarly project.
Tripod is the name of the database, or organized and searchable collection of information, which covers (basically) everything the Tri-College libraries own or have direct access to. When you search it, you will see items at Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr libraries in addition to Haverford's. You can use it to find books, articles, video, audio, images, and other media.
We are going to use Tripod to find reference books, like those we just talked about.
You can search Tripod by simply dropping in keywords, for instance an author's name, a title, some words that pertain to your topic, and so on. But in some cases this can be very inefficient or ineffective, and many times because you get far too many results, and many of those may be irrelevant to what you want, or because you're having to run a bunch of separate searches for similar things.
We're going to use the example case of looking for reference books to introduce some of these more advanced searching techniques.
First, open Tripod by clicking on the H icon next to the Tripod link above. Then look for and click on the Advanced Search button. This will bring up a number of tools for refining our search.
Next, click on the leftmost dropdown menu on the top line where you see a text input field. Scroll through the different options to get yourself familiar with them.
Now click on Title. Once we select this, we are telling Tripod to look for the words we enter only in the titles of things.
Reference sources usually have the type of resource they are in their titles. For example, this might be a Dictionary of Ancient Warfare or Companion to Ancient Roman Economics.
Tripod, like most other databases, also allows us to insert logical terms to make more nuanced or sophisticated searches. We can use AND, OR, and NOT in our search instructions, along with several special characters, to make our job easier.
If we want to search for either one word or another, we will put an OR between those words. The search engine will give us results that match at least one of those words. For example, we could enter peace OR pacifism. You can also keep using the logic word to create a longer string, like war OR conflict OR battle OR violence.
AND will give us results which bear all of the words we join together with it. A relevant search for this class might be women AND war.
NOT excludes a specific word. If you keep getting results that are about the United States Civil War and aren't interested in those, you might search war NOT civil.
Note how there is an AND to the left of the second row (of advanced search) where you can put in search words. You can use that to make a search that, for example, looks for one word or string of words strictly in titles, and another as more general keywords.
There are several really helpful special characters Tripod and most search engines will recognize, too.
Parentheses ( ) tell the search engine the order in which it should interpret the logic words we enter. We can combine the searches above together with them.
For example, if I wanted to combine women AND war with war NOT civil, I could make that:
(women AND war) NOT (civil OR (united states))
In the last half of this, notice that we have parentheses within parentheses. The reason we want (united states) together is because otherwise the search engine might not understand that the words United States go together.
Quotations " " force the search engine to run a strict or exact search for a set of words in the order you enter. This is especially useful searching for proper names or titles.
For example: "history of the peloponnesian war" will retrieve the title of the work by that name by Thucydides.
Wildcard symbols * / ? allow the search engine to find results with anything in the place of where you put the wildcard symbol.
? tells the search engine to accept anything just in the one spot where you put the ?.
For example, wom?n would search women, woman, womyn, and the like.
* (the asterisk) searches for any length of characters in the place where you put the asterisk *.
femin* would search for feminist, feminism, femininity, feminization, and so on.
