Introduction
Electronic Gateways
The Internet
Gophers
Finding and Retrieving Files
Bulletin Boards
Accessing Electronic Databases and
the Net
Where Am I?
The Booleans Have Landed!
Evaluating Information
History, the Internet, and the Future
Visit the Wadsworth Website
Introduction
Once upon a time, when students
or researchers needed to obtain information on a subject,
they headed for the library. There, they spent hours or even
days reading card catalogs or journals and making notes. All
of this was time consuming and inefficient. Eventually some
commercial and professional organizations compiled abstracts
and indexes of journals, books, and other sources of information.
This greatly reduced the time required to find needed information.
But still the process involved searching manually through
books and papers.
The United States government
designated libraries across the United States, usually associated
with universities, as repositories of governmental information.
Because of the vast amount of data stored by the government,
it was one of the first organizations to devise an electronic
system for organizing and retrieving this information. But
an even greater information retrieval revolution is now underway.
The advent of the personal computer, computer networks, and
the Internet has changed the amount of information available,
and the speed with which it can be located and retrieved,
and most of all, it has given the average person access to
information that was heretofore only available to scholars
with access to special libraries of information.
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Electronic Gateways
If you wish to take advantage
of the revolution in knowledge retrieval you must have access
to a computer and modem. If you don’t own a personal computer,
you can usually use the necessary hardware on campus.
This book has been designed
to help you to locate and retrieve information about history.
First, let’s consider some of the resources that are available.
The Internet
The Internet is an open connection
of networks that enables computers to communicate directly
with each other, usually through the telephone system. It
was originally developed by Vinton Cerf in the early 1970s
as part of a U.S. Government Defense Department Project. In
the 1980s it was turned over to the private sector and to
other government agencies for development. Its growth has
been phenomenal; estimates for the year 2000 indicate 100
million computers connected to the Internet.
In 1989, English computer
scientist Timothy Berners-Lee developed a system known as
the World Wide Web to enable researchers in the CERN Project,
who were in several different locations, to interact through
the Internet and access a variety of sources. Web sources,
or pages, as they are often called, are accessed using special
software browsers that display text, images, sounds, movies,
other objects, and links to other web pages. These links to
other web sites, or pages, are the most distinctive feature
of web pages; they enable the user to jump around the Internet—"surf
the web."
With access to the Internet
and special browser software, it is possible to access many
different kinds of information. Because the amount of information
available on the Internet is so vast, however, various systems
have been devised to organize it.
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Gophers
Gopher computers have been set
up by individuals and organizations around the world with
information on almost any subject you can imagine. The original
Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota as a way
of tunneling through the Internet to provide information in
an organized way. These Gopher sites usually present their
information in simple lists, called menus. Selecting one item
from the menu may lead to another, lower-level menu; selecting
an item on that menu can lead to another lower-level menu;
and so on. Selecting any item presents you with another menu.
Most colleges and universities have their own Gopher site,
and most provide access for their students to other Gopher
sites. The software search program used to explore Gopherspace,
as it is called, is known as Veronica. Even if your college
or university doesn’t provide Internet access, Gopher sites
can usually be accessed. Next time you are in the campus library,
ask for instructions about using your school’s Gopher. And
get acquainted with Veronica. You may be surprised by the
amount of interesting information you can find when working
with a Gopher system.
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Finding and Retrieving
Files
Another useful tool for exploring
the Internet is the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) site. These
kinds of sites allow users to easily transfer information
in the form of files from one computer to another. There are
thousands of FTP sites on the Internet which contain information
and files that can be down-loaded, or stored in the search
computer’s memory. After connecting to an FTP site through
the Internet, you can select a file that interests you and
transfer it. Once you have retrieved a file, you can read
it at your leisure. Many libraries and government web sites
have FTP sites with articles and reports that are free for
the taking. Some sites, however, charge usage fees, but if
you work on a campus library computer, even these sites may
be free.
The search program used to
explore FTP sites is known as Archie. Your own campus Gopher
may provide the same service. As you will no doubt have noticed,
once you are on the Internet it is easy to jump back and forth
from web pages, to Gopher sites, to FTP sites, etc. All of
these sites have different functions, but they are all accessible
on the same public Internet network.
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Bulletin Boards
Usenet groups are electronic
bulletin boards that allow discussion on a variety of topics.
These groups work according to the bulletin board system;
that is, you post your own message, and can read others’ messages.
The best way to get the hang of these groups is to locate
one you are interested in and read the messages that have
been posted for awhile. Then, jump into the fray with a posting
of your own! There are many Usenet groups relevant to history.
Keep in mind the free-wheeling nature of some of the discussions
you may encounter. The Internet is not regulated for content,
and it is important to remember this fact, especially when
accessing Usenet groups.
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Accessing Electronic
Databases and the Net
Most college and university libraries
or computer centers provide students with access to computer
terminals that can be used to search electronic databases
and sometimes even the Internet. Check with your library to
find out what is available and how to use it. Many colleges
and universities even provide students with e-mail addresses,
enabling them to receive electronic mail from another person
over the computer network or the Internet. If the library
doesn’t provide Internet access, you can connect on your own
with a personal computer and a modem linked to a telephone
line. Commercial on-line services such as America Online provide
Internet access at relatively low cost. In most cities, direct
Internet access is also available (for a fee) from various
Internet service providers. Whichever system you use, however,
once you access the Internet you basically use the same commands
to locate all Internet resources, especially if you are using
web browser software. If you are using a university system
that doesn’t have this access, you may be limited to only
the electronic media to which the library subscribes, and
also perhaps to the Gopher or FTP systems. Check with your
computer center or library to find out.
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Where Am I?
Once you have access to the Internet, you can’t go anywhere
without knowing your destination. On the Internet the address
or location of each individual site is known as a URL, or
Uniform Resource Locator. (URLs are indicated with italics
throughout this guide.) A URL usually begins with a prefix
signifying the transfer format, such as World Wide Web page
(http), FTP site (ftp), or Gopher server (gopher).
This is usually followed by a colon and two forward slashes,
as in http:// , or gopher:// . The next component
of the address usually identifies the host computer, the actual
server or location where the site can be accessed. The final
component of the URL identifies both the directory path and
name of the specific file. The host computer, directory path,
and file names are all separated by slashes. For example,
examine the following URL:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html
The http followed by the colon
and two forward slashes indicates that this is a World Wide
Web address; the host computer, or domain name is memory.loc.gov,
the directory where the file can be found is ammem,
and the actual file name is fsowhome.html. If you are
interested in seeing the vast collection of Depression-era
photos of the Library of Congress, this is the place to be.
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The Booleans Have Landed!
Search engines are software programs
that allow specific information to be retrieved in a search.
Almost all of these engines use keywords to limit the amount
of information retrieved. Some, such as Veronica and Archie,
were mentioned previously. There are also several other search
engines available, such as Yahoo, Lycos. Excite, AltaVista,
Infoseek, and Webcrawler. There is also "Ask Jeeves" at www.aj.com.
Here a portly butler will search all these sites for you at
once, and then list the results.
Most search engines have
a few things in common, even though they operate differently.
One of the most useful of these commonalities is that Boolean
logic operators (AND, OR, NOT and NEAR) can be used to add
flexibility to the search. Because of the fact that so much
information is available on the Internet and on electronic
databases, these Boolean logic operators help define or limit
the information retrieved in a search to only that which is
of interest.
Following are some brief
examples of how these Boolean logic operators function. For
example, if you were interested in finding information about
the role of Robespierre in the French Revolution, you could
begin with a key word search.
Using the Boolean logic,
the operator AND retrieves references that contain all key
words that are used in a search. If you searched for the key
words Robespierre AND France AND revolution, you would retrieve
only those references that contained all three key words.
Use of the Boolean operator AND helps to limit the scope of
a search, and reduces the number of items retrieved by a search
engine.
If you are interested in
finding information on any of the terms, use the Boolean logic
operator OR. This would retrieve references to documents that
contained any of the three key words. The use of the Boolean
logic operator OR enlarges the scope of a search.
Using the Boolean logic operator
NOT also limits the scope of a search. As an example, if you
were interested in finding only references from countries
other than the United States, you could use the Boolean logic
operator NOT to exclude the United States.
Consider the following sets:
Set A includes: grape, monkey,
pail, pen, scissors
Set B includes: candle, handle,
monkey, nail, scissors
Using Boolean Logic Operators
can help expand or limit the scope of an inquiry about elements
in these two sets.
Set A AND B yields: monkey,
scissors
Set A OR B yields: candle,
grape, handle, monkey, nail, pail, pen, scissors
Set A NOT B yields: grape,
pail, pen
Finally, the Boolean logic
operator NEAR retrieves references that contain the search
terms within a specified number of words of each other.
Again, be aware that the
Internet contains an immense amount of information. A scatter-gun
approach to searching will produce too much information—most
of it irrelevant. It is almost always worthwhile to target
your searches as precisely as possible. To help you do this,
many software search engines allow you to further narrow your
search. Or you could confine your search by starting at a
specific website and only searching from there.
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Evaluating Information
One of the major concerns that
many people have about the Internet is also one of its main
advantages. Anybody can (and many have!) put up their own
information, or home pages on the web, for everybody to see.
Some of the same rules about evaluation of print material
also apply to the Internet. First, when you get to a website,
find out who has created it. If it was created by an institution
whom you already trust, you can probably trust the information
in its website. Second, ask yourself why the information is
available to you. Commercial web sites are on the Internet
in order to sell products. Third, be aware that there are
some groups who have found the Internet to be a really inexpensive
and effective way to promote their point of view, even if
it is off-the-wall or just plain wrong.
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History, the Internet, and the Future
The Internet holds great promise
for historians and students of history, as it does for all
those studying academic disciplines. More sophisticated technology
and advances in browser design and related software will soon
make accessing web sites easier and faster. Simultaneously,
more history sites appear in the virtual Internet community
every day, some covering new topics and areas, others providing
more detailed coverage of topics and areas already on the
Web.
This means that the nature
of research will change. Libraries and paper-bound books and
journals will still be relevant, but as more and more primary
sources and academic journals are placed on-line, students
of history will increasingly turn to the Internet. The result:
less time spent trying to find necessary information and also
the increased ability to access in-depth information on any
subject, which will help compensate for libraries with incomplete
collections.
When using information from
the Internet, be sure to document it as best as possible;
guidelines for such documentation exist, and will most certainly
evolve over time. Check with your instructors and reference
librarians for the current preferred practices.
Visit the Website!
Visit the Wadsworth website to
find useful information about political science on the Internet.
The URL for the Wadsworth History Resource Center is:
http://www.wadsworth.com/history_d
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