Google tips
Using Google to get a sense of what's out there on a topic can be a great strategy. It's easy to use, and gets you many (many, many) results. Google is a good tool to find news, reports, statistics, regulations and other material not generally considered scholarly (referred to as 'grey literature').
Google also has some limiters - they just aren't very obvious.
I like to use the date range limiter and sometimes the News or Images feature, depending on what I'm looking for.
Searching large domains with Google
Adding a site limiter will ask Google to search only that site for results. I use it often for finding government resources, or NGOs, or US education sites.
- "wind energy" site:gov.bc.ca
(adding site:gov.bc.ca searches BC government websites)
- "wind turbine" site:gc.ca
(adding site:gc.ca searches Canadian federal government websites)
- "wind power" site:gov
(adding site:gov searches U.S. government websites)
-
educational technology site:edu
(adding site:edu searches education-related sites - this is used in the US) -
food security site:org
(adding site:org searches only sites that use the .org domain - usually NGOs or IGOs and nonprofits but more and more sites use this domain so be careful to evaluate what you're looking at)
Get full text of news articles
I'm sure you've noticed that more and more news outlets are requiring subscription information or payment before you can read the full article. Or, they only let you read a few articles per month.
Good news!
The library subscribes to many, many news sources. An easy way to check for an article is to copy the title into Summon, and put quotes around it.
Occasionally, titles of news stories are different online than they are in the databases. Try using part of the article, or browse the publication for that date by browsing - find the publication by putting the title (not the article title) into the Journals search on the library home page.
Don't be shy about asking me if you can't find it!