Information Search

Useful URLs, general information online, almanacs or encyclopedias online and search engines and other search tools are a good starting point on the internet.

Many educators prefer you not use internet sources as a starting point for your research. If that is the case, college libraries are a good place to start your research because of their vast, specialized holdings. An afternoon in a college library can help you to organize and refine your topic. Library catalogues are easily found on the web:

You can refine your topic and subtopics by looking at books on subject matter. World

Here are some library catalogue websites you may wish to access:

Drew University in Madison has a great selection for social studies and history:

Rutgers has an extensive selection of many topics including science:

FDU Library in Madison:

WorldCat examines resources from a number of institutions including the New York Public Library:

If you have received a topic from your teacher, and are not selecting your own, you can be fairly sure information can be found on the topic.

Once you have selected your topic and subtopic, ask you teacher if it is acceptable, if it is not be sure to ask your teacher’s advice on subject matter to guide you to what is required.

If you have found a source you wish to use, you can request books from JerseyCat or search the JerseyCat catalogue, which includes all of the NJ state libraries at:

Then you may make a request through your School Library Media Specialist who will alert you when your book is available.

Notecards are the traditional method and noodletools.com has a notecard option. I personally prefer to use an ongoing Word document in place notecards if required because I usually present papers in Word and I can cut and paste quickly and easily into my ongoing research paper. You can store your work on the cloud (box. net, mozy, Omnidrive, Xdrive—I recommend box.net) or on a thumb drive. If you store on the cloud, be sure to back up to a thumb drive so you will have your work available if you can’t get on the web.

Notecards simply include three things:

  1. Subject
  2. Information
  3. Source of information

Notecards require paraphrasing material but you can also plug text in to a website to help you narrow down that information. You can summarize using a website such as:

or, you can read the first sentence of each paragraph and just jot down keywords, which is what I prefer to do since I don’t have to wait for e-mails from a website.