Search Challenge (6/10/15):A few questions about art history...

I was in Philadelphia recently... 

and had the chance to visit the truly wonderful Barnes Foundation collection while there.  For many years, it was kept in semi-seclusion in a distant Philadelphia suburb that took some planning to go visit. 

Just a few of Renoir's paintings... 

What's more, the collection was never published, so when I first went to see it out in its original Merion, PA location, I was completely stunned by the works I saw there.  Picassos, Renoirs, Rousseaus... hundreds of master works that I had never seen... anywhere.  It was as though an entire museum had some how floated down from outer space. 

So in last week's trip to the new Barnes Collection location in downtown Philadelphia, I was able to revisit some old friends that I hadn't seen for a while.  

And, as so often happens, as I was strolling through the assembled paintings, lots of questions sprung to mind.  Here are three that I propose as Challenges for this week.   

1.  Dr. Barnes, who assembled the collection, was good friends with the American painter William James Glackens.  One of Glackens more famous works is called the Pony Ballet. When I saw the picture I was struck by the term "pony ballet."  Gentle Search-Researcher--what IS a "pony ballet" in the context of Glackens' time?  

2. One of the most striking features of the Barnes collection is the huge number of paintings by Renoir that are hanging there.  Image the strip of paintings above... in every room of the museum. There were so many there that it was hard to believe that they were all done by just one artist.  To make things worse, I'd also recently visited Paris where I saw many more Renoirs.  How busy was this man?  The Challenge is simple:  How many completed paintings did Renoir create in his lifetime? 

3. If you look at the strip of Renoir paintings shown above, the one on the far right is of a young woman drinking hot chocolate. Hot chocolate?  Really?  THAT made me wonder--How many of all of Renoir's works feature a cup of hot chocolate?   

4. As you can see from this strip of paintings, the post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau was famous for his many paintings of jungle scenes.  Some painters of the time (I'm thinking of you, Paul Gauguin) led interesting lives.  What about Rousseau?  His paintings are so elaborate and primeval, usually featuring extensive tropical landscapes.  To get that level of detail, he must have led an interesting life.  So, how long did he live in a jungle landscape?

Remember that I'll be answering these next Monday--not on Friday, to give everyone a bit of extra time.

When you research the answers to these Challenges, be sure to tell us HOW you found your answer.  Some of these Challenges are a true challenge ("pony ballet" is a funny one)--be sure you tell us how you found the answer (don't JUST give us the answer, but also the steps you took).  

I hope you enjoy these--I certainly had fun putting them together. 

Search on... Impressionistically (and Post-Impressionistically)!  

Answer: Find a community of people interested in ... this?

The Challenge this past week... 

... was to locate communities of people who could act as experts in a field to help us understand a particular topic area.  I proposed three topic areas to seek online help: apraxia, slickensides, and learning Finnish.  

A small community solving a navigation challenge

Cautionary tale:  A physician friend of mine saw this Challenge and wrote to me saying that most of the time, "...I don't want to be found..."  I understand his sentiment.  I also have times when I wish people would not ask me so many questions.  Hmmm.  

But the difference here is that we're looking for communities of people who are interested in the topic. Generally speaking, online communities are folks who are both interested AND have the time (and inclination) to be helpful.  But my friend's comment is a good point: online communities may (or may not) have the world's most expert in that topic.  Still, there's a lot of value to be had in Online Communities.  People who might not want to be contacted directly might very well participate in a discussion forum, if only because they realize the answer they post might well help many more people than they could help in-person.  (So be polite out there! Feel free to ask, but don't get your knickers in a bundle if the one world expert on your topic doesn't answer you immediately!)  

What's common between these topics?   

Smart context term choice:  In almost all cases, it's useful to search for groups with context terms like "group" "blog" "support" -- as in: 

     [ apraxia support groups ] 

     [ slickenside blog ] 

     [ learn Finnish discussion ] 

In each case, you're looking for an active group of people who are willing, able, and competent to answer your questions.  

As many readers noted, you still have to look at the blogs, groups, and forums that you find.  Some aren't active, and you want to be sure the people in the groups are well-informed about the content you're looking for. 

For example, many of the apraxia groups (e.g., hosted on Yahoo Groups or Google Groups) are inactive or closed.  Others require that you join them (which can take a while) in order to read the postings.  In any case, you can usually scan the topic headings quickly to figure out if the Group is still active and/or if posters are competent.  

In the apraxia example, I found this query to be the most useful: 

     [ apraxia discussion OR forum OR group ] 

It's worth commenting that blogs are typically one (or two) people writing about a topic.  That is, they're usually not a "community" in the normal sense of that word, but people who have active blogs often also have a community of commenters.  (See the comments on our SearchResearch blog--you're a community, no??)  

So getting to ask that community usually means contacting the blog author(s) and asking them.  If they don't know the answer, they'll often post it (as I do) to their blog and wait as their regular readers chime in with thoughts and comments.  

I think of an active blog as a community with a single contact point person.  

Reddit:  One trick that Elizabeth pointed out is that Reddit can be thought of as a giant collection of communities.  Unfortunately, the built-in Reddit search tool is pretty wonky.  When I want to find a sub-Reddit (which is the Reddit sub-thread on a particular topic), I either do: 

     [ site:reddit.com apraxia ] 
or 
     [ site:reddit.com inurl:apraxia ]
or 
     [ site:reddit.com intitle:slickenside ] 

(All of these queries lead to quite interesting subreddits.  It's a trick well-worth remembering.)  

StackExchange:  I'm very fond of the StackExchange network (Rosemary mentioned them in her comments).  It's a QA (question answering) site that is very high quality; it's impressive how well this community works together.  Using their own built in search tool, you can find "Exchanges" (i.e., places where people ask and answer questions).  A search for apraxia in their search tool finds a few things, while a search for "slickenside" yields nothing. 

However, if you go up one conceptual category (that is, to a description of the field or science in which slickensides are discussed) you can search for "geology" and find a very nice geology community whose entire reason-for-being is to answer your questions.  

Here's what you see if you do a search for "geology" on StackExchange.  You can see they call it "Earth Science"--and I'm sure they'd love to answer your questions about slickensides.  

As an aside, see the little "powered by Google" note?  That means they're using a Custom Search Engine, which basically is the same as using a site: operator on their site.  

What's different between these topics?   

Most people found the "Finnish discussion group" a little harder than the others.   

Just searching for "Finnish language" is WAAY too open-ended--you'll spend forever searching for the wheat among the chaff.  

As Regular Reader Susan pointed out, one approach is to think about in-real-life communities.  She changed her search to: 

     [ Finnish Language meet ups ] 

and found that there’s one in Mountain View (near where my friend lives).  

Perhaps the best approach here was to search for: 

     [ Finnish Language community ]

which leads to a number of online communities (e.g., Linq's Finnish Community, and GoVoluble's Finns, which connects native Finnish speakers with learners worldwide.  


One of the big differences is that both the terms "apraxia" and "slickenside" are pretty rare (which we also call "low frequency"), so it's easy to search for them without confusing much of anything.  Looking for "Finnish speakers," by contrast, leads to a bunch of audio gearheads who enjoy listening to the distinctively Finnish sound (??) of Finnish speakers, presumably while listening to authentic vinyl records at 33 & 1/3rd rpm.  

Oddly, I found a LOT of dead groups (pity...) when searching on the apraxia topic.  By contrast, I found very few dead geology groups when searching on the slickenside topic.  

I have no idea why.  I could speculate about geologist just lasting longer, but in truth, I don't know.  It points out (once again) that you really have to read through these things to determine if they're any good or not.  

I could go on... But go read the comments from last week's thread.  They're all really good.   Nice job, readers!  


Last question:  This week's post was delayed until Monday because I was travelling last Friday.  This is probably going to be happening more and more this year.  

And yet... maybe there's a bright side to this.  
I've noticed that people seem to post additional comments over the weekend. Whenever I DON'T run the answer on Friday, we always pick up a few extra reader comments.  

So... 

Should I run the Challenges from Wed - Mon?  Thu - Mon? 

Any thoughts on the topic?  If you like the Challenge to be up over the weekend, say so in the comments below.

And... 

Search on! 







-- 
6/8/15 5:45PM  -- Edited the post to note that Rosemary DID mention StackExchange. The previous version of this post said that nobody did; I just missed her comment totally! 

Search Challenge (6/3/15): Find a community of people interested in ... this?

As we've discussed, 

... one incredibly valuable skill for a SearchResearcher to have is the ability to identify and locate "communities" of people who are already experts (or extremely interested and passionate amateurs).  

It sometimes takes a village to find your way. The Byrd expedition of Antarctica, 1928.

Being able to find such communities is probably the single best way to find those people who can help you refine a SearchResearch question, or maybe even have the answer outright.  

For instance, finding the right community--and its online expression as a Wiki, an email list, a shared blog, a forum, or a Q&A site--can only link you with people who can instantly take your ill-formed and not-well-understood question, and either (a) change it into something that is searchable, or (b) give you the answer immediately.  

This is the basis for today's Challenge:  Can you find a community that can help answer questions in the following topics?  

1. Suppose my cousin had just been diagnosed as having apraxia.  I need to understand a bit more about this condition.  Can you help find me an online community that can help me learn much more about this?  

2.  My son's class just learned about slickensides in their science class.  Does an online community exist that would be able to answer my questions about this (and related topics)?   

3.  A friend is learning Finnish and would like to find a community where she can ask questions about the language. (That is, not just "how do I say this in Finnish?" but linguistics-style questions like "what does the translative case do?")  Can you find a community for her? 

I have three questions here because they are each very different in content (and you probably know the answer to at least one of them off the top of your head), and I suspect that each requires a somewhat different method to find each community.  

This week, can you FIND these communities?  (We can discuss what constitutes such communities in the comments.)  

And most importantly, tell us HOW you found them?  What searches did you do?  What led you to those discoveries?  

I'm pretty convinced that the ability to find communities is a key skill for SRS-ers.  Let's figure out a few great tips and tricks for locating them! 

Search on! 



P.S.  It's worth noting that the members of SearchResearch form a community... of people interested in how people can search (and research) for information online!  Think to yourself:  How would I find such people??  

Answer: Why so ... young?

It seemed to me... 

that the trees in the Dartmouth area were preternaturally young.  And this week's Challenge was to figure out why the trees in the greater area of Hanover, NH, were all around the same size: 

More importantly, they did NOT look like this: 

Old growth forest in NH (Nov, 1915). Image from Harvard arboretum. This tree fell during hurricane of 1938.

For this kind of a search, I turned first to Google Books and did a search on: 

     [ history of Dartmouth ] 

and found a number of books, all of which agreed that when Dartmouth was founded in 1769, the area was a forest primeval, and full of some very large, very impressive trees.  In one of these books, A History of Norwich, Vermont (Dartmouth Press, 1905).  I did a text-search for "tree" and found "..one tree was found to be 270 feet by actual measurement.  An acre of land could be enclosed, it is said, by four of these monsters properly felled.."  It goes on to point out that some of the largest pines by the river were between 300 and 400 years old, by count of their rings.  (You have to know that Norwich is directly across the river from Hanover, NH, maybe 1 mile away.) 

From this book (and others in that set), we know that there were VERY large trees in the Hanover area until the middle 1800s.  Then, timber was harvested with a vengeance. 

As I was searching, I remembered that Arcadia Publishing prints books that are basically collections of archival photos.  Maybe that would be a good place to start!  In Google Books, I did a search for: 

     [ "Arcadia Publishing" Dartmouth ] 

and found a few remarkable books.  The first I reviewed, "Early Dartmouth College and Downtown Hanover" (by Frank J. Barrett, Arcadia Publishing 2008) has a couple of photos from the Dartmouth Special Collections showing the clearcut farmlands around Hanover and Dartmouth from the 1860s.  As you can see, there's not a lot of trees here.    

So I'm willing to bet that nearly all of the trees we now see in the greater Hanover area date from after 1869.  

What else could have happened to the Hanover trees since 1869?  

I did a simple query: 

     [ "history of trees" Hanover NH ] 

which led me to the Wikipedia "History of New England" article, which told me about the New England hurricane of 1938, which led to a great loss of trees in New York, Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire.  (Note also the caption on the original photo of "Old Growth Forest" above--that tree was also lost in the 1938 storm.)  

This suggested that the trees of the Hanover area have had some... challenges... over the years.  Deforestation, storm damage, and when I did the query: 

     [ trees Hanover New Hampshire ] 

Reading through those results I was reminded of the devastation of Dutch Elm disease, which first arrived in New England in 1928, and wiped out a large number of the elms in New Hampshire.  

I spent a good deal of time searching for other archival images of Dartmouth, trying various searches: 

     [ age of trees Dartmouth ] 
     [ forest history Hanover NH ] 
     [ woods history Groften county ]    - the county where Hanover, NH is located 

etc etc.  And while I looked at many, many pages, I wasn't able to find any truly authoritative work.  

One of the tricks I often use to solve Challenges like this is to imagine the perfect document that would answer my question.  Then step back and ask, what would that be like?  And, using what insights I get from that envisionment process, try to find something perfect. 

Searches on News and Scholar yielded a few results.  Interestingly, one scholarly paper (DeGraaf & Miller, 1996) said that "... nearly all of the arable land of southern New England was in crops and pasture by 1820 - 1840..." and that major changes have happened to the region since then as a result of diseases and storms.  

But what I could NOT find was the perfect result.  Instead, I found lots of clues... 

And so we're left pulling together pieces of evidence from photographs and documents of effects that are hinted at by other writings.  

Another paper I found in Scholar from my search: 

     [ natural history trees OR forest hanover NH OR "New hampshire"  ] 

was Peart, et al.  (See below for citation.)  

(I chose to use "natural history" as I saw that phrase coming up time and again in my research.  It seemed like a bit of terminology that would be useful to me.)  

As they write:  

Canopy structure following the 1938 hurricane and subsequent salvage logging was evaluated from 1942 aerial photographs for six gauged watersheds in the northern hardwoods forest at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forrest, N.H. ... In 1942, percent openness (area without canopy cover) ranged from 13% to 38%... However, damage was patchy: the most heavily damaged area (72% open) was that which was logged least before the hurricane, and watersheds with most evidence of young second growth prior to the hurricane were apparently the least damaged. [however...] Recovery of the canopy in the heavily damaged area was rapid: in 1978, only 9% of the area was open, and canopy structure was similar to that in the gauged watersheds. Thus, 40 years of canopy development effectively masked the patchy effects of hurricane damage. 

And that pretty much matches what I'd seen in and around Dartmouth.  There are lots of trees, but mostly more-or-less similar in size and girth.  

After the heavy deforestation from the 19th century, and after hurricanes and diseases (such as Dutch Elm), the forest of Hanover seems to have been pretty much rebooted in the 1940s.

And that's most likely why the woods look as they do--beautiful, but rather young.  

Search Lessons

1.  Sometimes you have to integrate information across a number of sources.  This was the biggest thing I was doing here--pulling pictures from here, reading journal articles there, checking out books from the 19th century.  Sometimes there IS no one single resource that pulls it all together for you.  

2.  It's still useful to know some resources.  One of the most valuable bits of information I had was knowing that "Arcadia Publishing" tends to put out books with lots of archival images.  The site: restricted search on the Arcadia website was incredibly useful.  But I wouldn't have found it unless I knew--ahead of time--that these kinds of books existed.  

3.  Special terms can help out a lot.  Using the phrase "natural history" was a success in searching for books and papers about the forests around Hanover.  Be sure to notice these commonly-used phrases as you read about a topic or area.  They let you hone in on what you seek.  

4.  I didn't really know when to stop!  This Challenge took me more time than most (about 4 hours) because I kept having the feeling that someone  must have written about this phenomenon, but I just couldn't find it.  There really are times when you just have to stop, and trust that you'll find something more in the future.  You never know.  


Search on!  




_____________

DeGraaf, Richard M., and Ronald I. Miller. "The importance of disturbance and land-use history in New England: implications for forested landscapes and wildlife conservation." Conservation of faunal diversity in forested landscapes. Springer Netherlands, 1996. 3-35.

Peart, David R., Charles V. Cogbill, and Peter A. Palmiotto. "Effects of logging history and hurricane damage on canopy structure in a northern hardwoods forest." Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club (1992): 29-38.

  

Answer delayed... "Why so... young?"

I've been really busy this week 

(and I'm afraid next week will be similar--but more on that next week).  

So I'm going to answer this week's Challenge over the weekend when I'll have a bit more time.  Hurrah!  You have a couple of extra days to work on this!  

A couple of comments first... 

As several Regular Readers have pointed out, there is good evidence that once upon a time there was a heavy forest of rather large trees in the area of Dartmouth College.  Ramón (and others) pointed out that there were many pines, some of which were gigantic--a 240 foot pine tree is one BIG tree.  (Think of it as being 24 stories tall!)  

I suspect that before Dartmouth was formed, that area was a primeval forest.  Barring devastating forest fires, it would have been a "mature" forest.  

So I've been looking at historical accounts of the early days of Dartmouth, looking for written records of how the lands around Dartmouth appeared in the 18th century, and then checking for updates since then.  (I've had some luck here.)  

I'm also looking for old maps and photo archives.   For instance, compare these two images side-by-side.  One is from 1887, while the other is from 2013 (and is as close to the location of that earlier sketch as I could guess:  East Wheelock Street in Hanover, NH, not far from Darthmouth College).   

Remember that we're not looking JUST at elms (although the elm story is quite interesting), but at the entire range of forest trees.  

Looks like the place was pretty much deforested not that long ago.  

Does this suggestion help your search?  

Searching on! 

Search Challenge (5/27/15): Why so... young?

I recently had the chance... 

to visit Dartmouth College, that lovely old school in Hanover, New Hampshire.  Nestled in the forests over the White River, just on the border with Vermont, it's a verdant, green campus with beautiful old buildings, a large grassy quadrangle, and a young, energetic student population.  

Baker Memorial Library on Dartmouth Campus

The region is very rural, with hills, large tracts of forest, and the occasional farm.

As we drove around, one thing struck me:  in the forests near Dartmouth, all of the trees are fairly small in diameter.  In fact, the majority of them seem to be roughly the same size...and therefore (I surmise) roughly the same age.  

1.  Why?  

Some context:  I live near the Santa Cruz mountains, and when I walk through these forests, the trees vary enormously in size from one to the next.  There are young trees, but every so often you see truly gigantic trees of enormous girth and age.  (And I'm not even talking about the redwoods that live here, but just the local oak trees.)  

Near Dartmouth: Note tree sizes

So after a while in New Hampshire, it dawned on me that there's not a lot of size variation among the trees there.  And that's what led me to ask "why?"  

Near Dartmouth: Note tree sizes

There are a few older trees on the Dartmouth campus--most famously, it has an impressive collection of American elms (that are large, old, beautiful, and carefully protected by the school).  But what about just off-campus?  What happened there? 

Any ideas? 

An old American Elm on Dartmouth campus (2011)

Answering this question might be a little tricky as it involves a somewhat undefined region (let's limit it to the region near Dartmouth).  Even so, what will your resources be to answer this question?  

Search on!  (And be sure to let us know what you find out, and HOW you discovered it!)  

Answer: A conversation about learning rapidly...

Learning rapidly... 


Our question this week was how to learn about a new (to you) topic rapidly.  I asked

   1.  What do you do when you need to learn about a topic area very quickly?  


I'm not asking as a way to avoid work, but it happens fairly often that I'm working on a deadline and need to learn something as efficiently as possible.  In other words, how do you become an expert on the subject quickly, or least be able to find relevant information without getting lost in all of the possible documents?

The conversation was actually pretty good, although it was scattered across Facebook comments, G+ comments, the thread of posts here in the blog, and a couple of hallway conversations!  Let me try to pull some of those threads together and close with a thought of my own.

First, let me introduce a couple of technical terms:

a field of interest (get it?)

a domain is the "topic of interest."  That is, field, or the topic area that you want to learn about.  A particular domain might be "how immunosuppressants work" or "what is a perceptron and what are they good for" or "aphasia."  (In the examples below, when you see the word domain, I mean that you should substitute the key terms that describe your domain.  Example:  domain might be "aphasia treatments" -- assuming that's your domain.)

framing is establishing the question(s) that you really want to answer, and setting up the context in which the answer makes sense.  That is, a domain question like "teach me about the Civil War" needs a bit of framing in order to be sensible:  Whose civil war?  When and where was it fought? What do you want to know about that war?  How much detail do you need?  All of that kind of information sets the frame.

a library reference interview happens when you talk to your local reference librarian about what you want to learn.  (Consider doing that as well--the librarians know a bunch of stuff that's really useful, including resources that might take you a while to discover.)  In the interview, you will frame your question and set expectations.  You need to figure out in this discussion when you can stop.  (You're on a deadline, remember?  Assume you'll never learn enough to be a real expert--how do you get to a place where you can write a competent article in that area.)  But if you can't get to a reference librarian easily, you can walk yourself through your own interview.  In short, Know Thyself.


I've taken the conversations I've had this week and organized them into Strategies and Tactics.

Strategies: 

* Learn the language / argot of the domain. Learning some search terms that enabled me to structure my search more effectively. Judith writes that....

"Once I had a student who was going to be interviewed for a job at a local transportation museum and had to find information on the trams in the 19th century and early part of the 20th century that were pulled by teams of horses. After searching several different ways, I found in Wikipedia that they are usually called horsecars and searching that one word led me to multiple sources of information, including the variations of "horse cars" and horse-cars." 

Earlier, Henry wrote that:

"Today, I decided to see if I could put a chin-up bar in my attic. What this came down to was determining if there was a thing that would attach a piece of piping to a piece of wood, perpendicularly. Of course, there is -- it's called a pipe flange, which you probably knew, and I applaud your greatness. My point is, as soon as I knew the word, I knew my answer -- yes, and it's going to take a flange or two...."  

Learn those terms!

* Find out who are the relevant / best writers in the domain.  And once you know that, find out what else they've written.  Often, it will be on topic and relevant to your quest.

* Find out the best institutions that work in the domain.  Same idea, except you want to limit your searches to that particular place.  For example, you might find that the team doing the best research is all in the Geophysics department at the University of Pocatello (fictitious example)..... then a site-limited search like [ site:upocatello.edu/geophysics ] might reveal a lot of things you never thought about.

* Check Google Books for books on the domain.  You might be surprised at how often books are still incredibly useful to learn something quickly.  Pay attention to the table of contents to get a quick lay-of-the-land.  The authors have gone to a lot of trouble to organize a book in terms of all the pieces you need to know about.  Check it out in this example: the table-of-contents for a textbook on aphasia)

* Check YouTube for videos on the domain.  Remember that you can use many of the tricks from regular web-search on YouTube.  (e.g., using context terms to describe what you seek)

* Look for groups of people (blogs, forums, listservs, mailing lists) interested in your domain.  In my previous post I mentioned a couple of tricks around finding blogs, forums, and people selling artifacts in your topic.

* Describe your problem to someone else.  Often, when you have to explain what it is you're trying to learn, you'll realize what the shapes and contours of the domain are... and what you really need to know, and what you really do not know!  

* Look for multiple different sources.  For instance, Google Maps is great, but consider also looking at WikiMiniAtlas, or OpenStreetView.  Likewise, different stories / different authors often give you varying perspectives on the ideas of the domain.  Use that same strategy when doing a comparison across web sites, books, or journals.

* Use your social networks. As I'm mentioned before, sometimes the best way into a field is to reach out to your friends, especially those that have broad-ranging interests or are really well-connected themselves.  Often a post to Facebook or G+ (or your favorite community) can get you the right information very quickly.  (In truth, this is why I lurk on a number of lists...  just so I can learn from them and ask the occasional question.)  Teachers sometimes talk about their PLN (Personal Learning Networks)--it's the same idea--developing and cultivating a group of people that you can ask questions of (and implicitly, also answer their questions too).

* For scholarly/academic articles, check Google Scholar.  A search on a domain in Scholar will often give you the latest and greatest academic work in an area.  Often, it will be a bit TOO technical to be useful to you.  (It happens to me all the time.)  A recent example I did:  [ coral reef bleaching] But you can use Scholar to identify the people and institutions that are doing the best work.  Then you can search for those people and more broad-brush articles they might have written. 

Tactics: 

* Check Wikipedia first. Judith again:  "I never rely on Wikipedia alone... but it often has useful links to other sites."  She's right--it's not the ending point for your research, but it has incredible coverage (millions of topics), and sometimes the articles are very well done.  (And sometimes not.  Use your good taste to decide.)  A related topic...

* Check Wikipedia in other languages as well.  Some topics have very different treatments across the various Wikipedias.  Compare and contrast the entries for Leonardo da Vinci in English vs. Italian. That's variation, often useful.

* Use databases that contain content not available through Google.  As I'm talked about before, libraries often have access to proprietary databases, which are useful if they're on the domain of interest.  (For example, the various genealogy databases are very good for that domain of research.)

* Control-F your way through a document using the specialized language you've learned, looking for places where the terms you care about occur.  (Take note that in Chrome, you can see the yellow-bars showing you where everything is in the doc.)

* Take notes.  Several people mentioned that they start taking notes (usually in a Google Doc) whenever the search task starts to become non-trivial.  This is obvious, but it's always surprising how often people don't think about this.  A note doc is handy for stashing names of experts, domain specific terms that you don't know, and the names of institutions that are relevant.

* Find trade associations in the domain.  Hans pointed out that "...I usually try to find an organization or trade association that is working on that specific area. I use keywords like industry trade group, business association, International association or sector association and combine them with the terms of the domain I’m looking for. Also limiting the search to the .org domain is very effective.  Examples:  [uv-led curing trade associations]  or  [uv-led curing site:.org]  Another option is to use a directory: e.g., Associations on the Net (From the Internet Public Library) - http://www.ipl.org/div/aon/

* Search for tutorials and lessons on the domain.  When you need to learn something quickly, do some searches where you explicitly search for things like [domain tutorial] or [domain seminar] or [domain training] or [domain lesson] or [domain lecture]  Pro tip:  Sometimes it's really useful to also limit your search to presentations.  Example:  [aphasia filetype:PPT OR filetype:PPTX tutorial]

* Set your information level for what you really need and can really use.  As Debbie and Anne point out, knowing what level of information you're looking for can be really useful.   "...Our subscription [to Encyclopedia Brittanica] offers 3 different levels so students can choose a reading level that is more comfortable for them and is much more visually appealing. We don't have anything against Wikipedia but for some students the layout of Britannica is better."

* Look for a QA site in the domain.  Some domains (like math, programming, English, finance, bicycling, music, cognitive science, etc) have QA sites (question-answering) that are amazingly good.  In particular, check out the StackExchange QA sites for a broadly based set of experts that can answer questions (or look for your question before you ask it out loud).  Some of these sites are pretty junky, but the StackExchange sites are generally very good.



This is a summary of all the conversations I've had this week (plus a few of my own thoughts).

Keep writing, and I'll keep updating this list.  Hope you found this useful!