Answer: Difficult to find?

I'm often surprised... 

... when a Search Challenge turns out to be unexpectedly difficult.  Alas, this happens more often than I'd like.  You'd expect that by now I'd have a good sense for what makes a SearchResearch question easy or hard.  

To be fair, I think my assessment of hard vs. easy is correct about 90% of the time, it's just that pesky 10% of Challenges that keeps me on my toes.  The last Challenge of 2019 was like that.  

Here it is again:  


1. Can you find the full text of this article? 

Hebb, D. O. (November, 1978) “On watching myself get old”  Psychology Today, 12(6):15-23

This article came up in a conversation with my friend Pete, who mentioned that there were some great ideas in this article, and that I should read it.  

This was--I thought--going to be a quick search.  I'd planned on finding a magazine archive site and then just opening that particular volume from 1978... I'd expected it to be just a couple of minutes.  

Here's what happened instead: 

First thought: Maybe it's in the Google Books collection of Magazines.  They have a good collection of magazines, but it's a bit idiosyncratic--if they have what you seek, all is good.  For instance, Google Books has the complete run of Life magazine, New York magazine, The Advocate, Ski, Field & Stream, and so on. 

Here is a reasonably complete list of the magazine holdings in Google Books (about 140 items long).  

 But there's no Psychology Today!  

Where to next?  

I thought I'd check to see if the publisher / magazine has an archive.  The query:  [ "psychology today" archive ] quickly leads you to the Psychology Today archive... which, turns out to go back to January, 1992.  Not enough for our purposes.  

On the other hand, the site does offer to sell you back issues, but starting only with June 2003... there's nothing before that.  

But it did make me think that I should search for a place that sells magazine back issues.  

     [ magazine back issues ] 

takes you to a few different sites, but most notably the website BackIssues.com has a pretty deep collection--including our sought-after issue (volume 12 from 1978)... for $11.11 + shipping, which would bring it to $15.  (It would also take a week or so to get to me.)  

Obviously, I want to find this online and for free.  Is there a way? 

That previous query also suggested that I check the academic research service Questia.com for the magazine.  (Questia  claims to have more than 94,000 academic books and more than 14 million journal, magazine, and newspaper articles in their collection.  It also costs real money.)  

But when I check their holdings of Psychology Today, I see it only goes back to 2012--and that doesn't work for this Challenge.  

However, it DOES give me the idea to check other academic library data services.  

Sidenote: I promise that I'll write up an entire post about academic databases (what they are, what they cover, etc.)... but that will be for a future time.  

I logged into my university library site and found that lots of academic databases cover Psychology Today, but their coverage is often very limited.  I checked some of the big, well-known databases, but few of them go back to the '70s.  

I DID find that Gale's Health and Wellness database has entries for those dates... but when you drill down, you'll find it's ONLY citations (and not complete ones at that).  That is, you can find the article, but you can only see what kind of article it is and when published!  Frustrating!  

This is getting tough.  Does this exist anywhere online?  Maybe not!  

Next good idea?  Look for hardcopies (or microfilm) copies.  How do you do that?  I'll check WorldCat.org to find places close to me that would have the magazines from 1978.  

Here's WorldCat's interface: 

Clearly we'll want to use the "Advanced Search" option.  In that interface I specify the title, the years, and the format ("Journal/Magazine"): 

Once you do this, you'll get back a list of libraries near you (here, you can see my Zip code--but note that this works internationally as well and can point you to libraries nearly everywhere):

Here you can see that there are 5 libraries that have copies of Psychology Today, all within 3 miles (5km) of me.  

I know I can't get into the Sofia University library, so instead I hop on my bike and zip over to the Stanford Hospital Health Library (which IS open to the public).  

That's when I find out that I did a dumb thing:  I should have checked their holdings before going over!  ("Holdings" means what they actually have, either via online access or physically in the library.)  

If I HAD done that (by visiting their website and checking), I would have seen this: 

Which is fine:  They have access to Psychology Today in an eJournal format through Gale Health and Wellness... which we already know doesn't offer the full-text of articles before 1992!  Moral: Check the holdings before bicycling to the library. 

On the other hand, the librarian there mentioned that the Green Library (the main library on Stanford campus) probably did have it in hardcopy.  

Thankfully, although it's a private university, Stanford lets anyone search their online catalog, which is often a great way to find information about what you seek.  (I learned my lesson and checked before biking over.)  

In this case, I went to Stanford's online catalog and did the obvious search for their holdings on Psychology Today.  

As you can see, they have online access (again, nothing before 1992), but when you click on the "Check availability" button (gray button at the bottom), you get a new bit of information: 

Click to zoom in.

Hurrah!  They have hardcopies of the magazine, and they even have all of the issues going right back to 1978 and beyond.  

Even better:  See the blue button that says "Request on site access"?  That lets you request that the volume with that issue in it be brought out of long-term storage and be delivered to the library.  You can't take it out of the library, but you're able to scan it yourself. 

I'm not a Stanford student, and although I've taught computer science there in the past, I don't have any special privileges now.  But the Stanford library allows each person in the community to visit the library up to 3 times each year.  (Kudos to them for this!)

This method works to get the scanned version of the article, although it takes a bit of time.  I got it, scanned it, and life is good. 

But noticing that university libraries have collections like this leads to.... 

Another method to get the article!!  

Obviously, university libraries often have great archives of older non-scanned / non-full-text magazines and journals.  

As I've said before (and will doubtlessly say again), Keep any university library affiliation that you ever have... 

Why?  This is a perfect example.  

While I was waiting for the Stanford library delivery, I emailed to a few of my friends in other academic universities.  They went through the same process at their libraries (U. Maryland, UC San Diego, and U. North Carolina Chapel Hill)--each requesting a scan from the archives.  

To their credit, all three of my friends were able to come up with the scan in 24 hours (often by having a library worker pull out the appropriate microfiche and then convert that image to PDF--that's a service many university libraries provide). 

Bottom line:  I wasn't able to find a scan of the article anywhere on the web via regular search, I WAS able to get a scanned version through university archives (and a little human intervention).  All's fair in love and search!   

Here's the first page of the article.  I have the rest.  

Many thanks to my university library friends:  Nevenka (Maryland), Don (UCSD), and Gary (UNC Chapel Hill). It really pays to have a great, skilled, very literate social network that can help your SRSing.  

2.  Can you find the novel by James Patterson that has a yellow cover AND has a number in the title? 

This turns out to be fairly straight forward, although complicated a bit.  

I went to Images.Google.com to do a regular image search and then used the Color Filter tool to limit the covers to yellow... 

The result was a bit of a surprise: 

I didn't know that James Patterson has a LOT of books with numbers in the title!  

Doing a bit of checking on Google Books (or Amazon) quickly tells us that queries like: 

     [ James Patterson 1 ] 
     [ James Patterson 2 ] 

(etc.) 

... all yield books by Patterson up to 12 (probably beyond, but I stopped checking there).  

It's probably the case that MANY books by James Patterson have numbers, and many are yellow.  

Is there a list with all of Patterson's book titles? 

     [ list of books by James Patterson ] 

leads us to this list of books (from Patterson's website):  

1st to Die, 2nd Chance, 3rd Degree, 4th Of July, The 5th Horseman, The 6th Target, 7th Heaven, The 8th Confession, The 9th Judgment, 10th Anniversary, 11th Hour, 12th of Never, The 13-Minute Murder, 14th Deadly Sin, 15th Affair, 16th Seduction, 17th Suspect, 18th Abduction, 19th Christmas, 96 Words for Love

Well!  That certainly limits the range of possibilities.  Time to go back to my friend Bill and ask for a BIT more information.  There are 19 books here... surely he must have a bit more information to help out on our search!  

Search Lessons 

There are a bunch to take away here.  

1.  Not everything is online!  I know it's a surprise to some of you, but there are useful articles that were written before the age of the digital, and much of them haven't yet been digitized.  (The back catalog is really huge.  Maybe we'll get it all scanned in the future, but for the time being, you have to remember this.  It's NOT all online.)  

2.  One investigation leads to another.  In the long story of finding the article, notice how trying one thing often led to another idea about something to try.  Here's the recap of what I did:  

Google Magazines led to...
Psychology Today magazine archive led to...
searching for back issues led to...
Backissues.com led to...
Questia.com led to...
other academic sites led to...
Gale’s Health and Wellness led to...
WorldCat led to...
Stanford Health library led to...
Stanford Green library led to...
other academic libraries led to..
emailing librarian friends... 

That's a lot of steps, but notice that most of the steps were pretty quick.  The takeaway is that one idea often leads to (or is suggested by) something you're doing now.  In the case of my search on Backissues.com, it was an advertisement that reminded me of Questia and all of the other online databases.  

3.  Check the library listings carefully BEFORE you travel.  Don't do what I did and just travel to the library--the online catalog can save you multiple trips IF you use it before you travel. Make sure they really have what you want.  

4.  You have friends in libraries who can help out.  In this case, I have wonderful friends who can help with access to otherwise difficult to find content.  Make friends with your librarians--they are often your best internet search resource!  

5.  Remember that the search idiom [list of ... ] is a handy thing.  People love to make lists--they'll make lists of the craziest things. (My favorite list-of is the Wikipedia List-of-Lists-of-Lists.  It's always entertaining reading.)  

Hope you found this search saga interesting.  I certainly had a good time.  

Search on! 

A New Year - What did you like about the previous year's SRS?

Goodbye to 2019 and welcome 2020!

Sunset on NYE 2019.

I'll write up the answer to the previous Challenge tomorrow.  But for today I want to take a quick look back and ask what you liked about 2019's string of Challenges.  

I'm asking for two reasons:  (1) to learn a bit about what kinds of Challenges you like (and what you DON'T like) in order to make 2020 even better.  (2) to put the Challenges you really like into consideration for The Joy of Search Volume 2!  (To be honest, I don't have a contract for Volume 2 yet... I'm doing this a bit on spec.)  

For instance, did you like:  

"Does anything live deep in the earth?"  or did you prefer "Where did the river go?"

Maybe you're more of a "Contour Lines?" person, maybe "What's the story... of these ruined buildings?"  

Perhaps you liked the object identification Challenges:  "What's this thing?"  


If you have thoughts or opinions you'd like to share with me, please fill out this quick survey 

             CLICK here for the 4-question survey.  


And thanks for all the great comments and responses throughout the year.  Hope 2020 is the year when all of your searches succeed! 

-- Dan 

SearchResearch Challenge (12/18/19): Difficult to find?

In some sense... 

... this blog is all about documents that are difficult to find.  We search for articles about life deep underground, or rivers in Spain, or sex ratios of different animals.  

But sometimes we need to find A SPECIFIC article or a SPECIFIC book.  Usually it's because someone has recommended it and we realize that we just have to find it.  

My friend Pete recommended an article to me the other day.  Unlike most suggestions like this, he actually knew exactly what the citation was.  Here's what he told me:  "Go read this article, I think it was in Psychology Today, the title is "On Watching Myself Grow Old."  

Great.  That's not a lot to go on.  But with a few SRS skills I was pretty quickly able to figure out that he meant this article... 

Hebb, D. O. (November, 1978) “On watching myself get old”  Psychology Today, 12(6):15-23

"Excellent,"  I thought to myself, "finally!  A decent citation!"  I thought it would be a 5-second search to get the article.  

But no! 

It turns out to be harder than it looks.  Much harder.  I'll be curious to see how you solve it.  


1. Can you find the full text of this article? 

Hebb, D. O. (November, 1978) “On watching myself get old”  Psychology Today, 12(6):15-23

I'll tell you, I finally found it, but it wasn't easy.  Can YOU find it more rapidly than I could? 



In another conversation from this week, my friend Bill said  "I loved that book by James Patterson that had a number in the title.  You have to read it!"  

"That's it?"  I protested.  "That's all you can tell me?"  

"Oh yeah.  The cover was yellow.  Does that help?"  

Kinda.  I guess.  So I put it to you:  


2.  Can you find the novel by James Patterson that has a yellow cover AND has a number in the title? 


Good luck with these!  

Be sure to tell us HOW you found the Psychology Today article and that yellow-number-in-the-title book by James Patterson.  I'm sure we'd all love to learn how you did it! 

Search on! 

A heroic search video

As I said a couple of weeks ago... 

... I don't often recommend videos, but this new video from Google Search Marketing is wonderfully uplifting, and we could all do with a little uplift these days.  

I enjoyed it, and I thought you might as well.  

Maybe you have a hero in your life.  I hope so.  One of the big points of this video is that we can all be heros.  Here are some wonderful examples.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRCdORJiUgU

Enjoy.  

Search on! 

Answer: Does anything live deep in the earth?

Let's go deep.  


As discussed, I have NO IDEA what animals might live deep in the earth. But... 

Anyone down there? 

Does anything live down there?  How far down in the earth does life extend?  

You can see where this is going.  Our Challenge for this week was:   

1.  What, if anything, lives deep in the earth? I know moles, earthworms, ants, and gophers live in the earth--but they don't go very deep.  Are there any creatures that live REALLY deep in the earth? If so, what are they like?   



I started my quest with a straightforward search: 

     [ life deep in the Earth ] 


I was pleased to find some interesting reports about life deep in the crust of our planet.  Astronomy.com and Phys.org reports that there's life, specifically nematodes, that life about 1 miles (1.6 m) underground in South African mines. 

Unidentified nematode (Poikilolaimus sp.) in a biofilm of microorganisms, from under Kopanang
gold mine in South Africa. By Gaetan Borgonie/Extreme Life Isyensya, Belgium.

This report is from the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a collaborative network of geologists, chemists, physicists and biologists searching for life deep underground.  

That's great!  Not only is there small life way underground, but there's an entire network of people looking for it.   

First question to ask:  Who / what is the DCO?  It's easy to find the DCO home page, which describes them as  

"...a team of scientists...with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation [investigating] how the deep carbon cycle drives our world.

The DCO brings together a multidisciplinary group of scientists, including geologists, chemists, physicists, and biologists.

The DCO Science Network, is made up of more than 1200 scientists from 55 countries..."  

I've heard of the Sloan Foundation. That's a well-known research support foundation that does large grants to further science throughout the world.  They're credible, and when I check the Sloan site, I see their initial grant to Oxford to start up the DCO.  And I see their management team at the Carnegie Institute.  (Another well-known research place.)  

I clicked through on the link to the original report from DCO and found more data.  I didn't know that they also have a project that has drilled 2.5 kilometers into the seafloor, and found microbes in boreholes more than 5 km (3.1 miles) deep.  

In addition to nematodes, two types of microbes—bacteria and archaea—dominate the deeper parts of Earth. There are millions of distinct types of bacteria, most yet to be discovered or characterized, that form a kind of microbial “dark matter.” Deep Life scientists say about 70% of Earth's bacteria and archaea live in the subsurface.  

That's astounding.  

Deep microbes are often very different from their shallower relatives, often with life cycles on near-geologic timescales.  

In some cases, they exist on nothing more than rocks.  No organic materials input required.  They directly digest and get energy from the minerals themselves.  

What's more, the genetic diversity of life below the surface is comparable to or exceeds that above the surface.  

Luckily, the DCO page (above) links to their peer-reviewed work.  Here's a sample from that page: 

The biomass and biodiversity of the continental subsurface. (2018) Nature Geoscience Magnabosco C, Lin L-H, Dong H, Bomberg M, Ghiorse W, Stan-Lotter H, Pedersen K, Kieft TL, van Heerden E, Onstott TC

Exploring deep microbial life in coal-bearing sediment down to ~2.5 km below the ocean floor. (2015) Science Inagaki F,  (et al.)  


What this tells me is that indeed, life DOES exist way down deep into the earth, and that it's remarkable.  

One of the terms I picked up as I read through these reports is microbiome--that is, the collection of microscopic bacteria and other organisms that live together in a particular environment.  Learned that term led me to do this query: 

     [ deep underground microbiome ] 

which leads to all kinds of articles.  In these articles we find that: 

* deep earth life holds 15 to 23 Billion tonnes of Carbon, 245 - 385 times the carbon mass of surface-living humans

* that is, up to ~70% of Earth's bacteria and archaea live underground... not out where we can see it!  

* deep underground microbes are very different than surface microbes, living life on near-geologic timescales, in some cases consuming nothing more than energy from digesting rocks, 

* the genetic diversity of life below the surface is comparable to or exceeds that above the surface,

* microbial community richness relates to the age of marine sediments where cells are found—suggesting that in older sediments, food energy has declined over time, reducing the microbial community

The absolute limits of life on Earth in terms of temperature, pressure, and energy availability have yet to be found. As we learn more, the records are continually broken. 

A frontrunner for Earth’s hottest organism is Geogemma barossii, a single-celled organism living in hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Living in hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, this microscopic spherical bacteria survives at 121 degrees Celsius (251 Farenheit; that's 21 degrees above the boiling point of water).   

And... the depth? 

The record depth at which life has been found below the surface is approximately 5 km (3.1 miles).  Meanwhile, the record below the ocean is 10.5 km from the ocean surface at 4000 meters depth below the sea floor.  (That's nearly 11 km (6.8 miles).)  

Admittedly, these are only microbes--but they're amazing and live under extreme conditions (which is why they're called, collectively, extremophiles , but also, hyperthermophiles for those that like it hot).  

Ultimately... I think we've found our answer--at least for the moment.  Nematodes (multicellular life) can exist down to 2.57 km (1.6 miles) underground, while bacteria can make it to nearly 11 km (6.8 miles).  

But I'm sure we're find more, deeper, probably hotter in the coming years.  

Other notes: 

SRS Regular Reader found some great content as well.  Arthur Weiss found this superb BBC documentary about deep life focusing on nematodes (including the remarkable  Monhystrella parvella, which lives at 2.2 miles (3.6km) down.  See also the article in Nature (a very well-known scientific journal) about the deep-living nemtodes of South Africa.  

SRS RR Jon (the Unknown) found that CBS 60 Minutes had done a segment on this: What lies two miles beneath the Earth's surface?  (It's a bit painful to watch--you can't skip through the ads--but it's got some great visuals.) 

Research Lessons 

While it wasn't hard to do this piece of research, there's certainly a lot of stuff to wade through.  

1.  Keeping all of the research findings straight takes notetaking.  I know that I needed to keep a set of notes (in a handy Google Doc) with just the URL, a word or two about what's relevant, and whether it was from a reputable source, a peer-reviewed journal, or simply a news site.  

2.  Pick up specialized terminology as you read.  Once again we found that as you read, you should pay attention to the specialized language of the articles you see.  That's how I picked up the term "microbiome," which led to many excellent articles.  (Why did that work so well?  Because it's kind of a technical term that's used in kind-of-technical articles, which is what I was looking for.) 

Excellent job this week.  

Search on!  


P.S.  Sorry about the delay in finishing this SRS answer.  It's the end-of-the-year... what can I say?  There's a lot going on!  

SearchResearch Challenge (12/4/19): Does anything live deep in the earth?

As you know, I love diving... 

... and although I never go much below 100 feet (33 meters), I'm fascinated by the creatures that live way down deep in the sea.  They're interesting, wonderful, and exceedingly strange.  

But... as I was talking with a friend yesterday I realized that while I have a pretty good idea of the animals that live in the bottom of the sea, I have NO IDEA what animals might live deep in the earth. 

Any creatures down there? 

That made me curious:  Does anything live down there?  

You can see where this is going.  It's time for us to go deep.   

1.  What, if anything, lives deep in the earth? I know moles, earthworms, ants, and gophers live in the earth--but they don't go very deep.  Are there any creatures that live REALLY deep in the earth? If so, what are they like?   

How would you start a search like this?  

I'm really curious about two aspects of this: 
     (a) How far down in the earth does life exist?
     (b) How do you (the researcher) know? 

What counts as a credible source for an SRS Challenge like this?  (Few of us are going to actually go check it out, so what makes you believe a particular source?)  

I'm really curious to see what we can discover.  

How far down into the planet does life exist?  

Let us know what you find.  Be sure to say HOW you found it, and WHY you believe the source!  

Search on!  

Why connected people are also better searchers!

I bet you’re a skilled online searcher... 

....if you’re reading this, you might even be an expert at online search. 

Note:  This post originally appeared in the blog, Connected Learning.  

But improving your search skills is one of those things that will pay dividends way beyond your expectations. That’s what this post is really all about—how to be much better at digging up the content you need to find fast, accurately, and with skill.

This is the premise of my new book, The Joy of Search: A Google insider’s guide to going beyond the basics (MIT Press, 2019). 

There are the tips and tricks that you’d expect from a book like this—the tactics that great online searchers know, but there’s much more to know about search than knowing about when to use double quotes. That’s just a little tactic you should have under your fingertips. Instead, knowing the big strategies of search can shift your searches from merely okay to truly great.

At the heart of this book are 17 compelling search stories—each one starting with a question that you (or a student) might have, something that you find curious or startling about the world. How you go about answering that question is the story for each chapter.

In the spirit of Connected Learning, one of the most important strategic things great searchers do is to rely on their personal set of connections to amplify the range and scope of what they can find. This message resonates throughout all of the stories and is an important lesson: One of the properties of great researchers is that they have a great set of connected people they can contact with questions.  

Serendipity amplification

As you know, serendipity can be amplified by social networking—just letting people know of your interests can open up connections you might not have known about. Networking casts a broad net on your behalf and suddenly you’ve got dozens of eyes and ears scanning the world around you for your research questions. It pays to have friends.

Mudejar stars are a common design feature in Spain. Where do they come from?

For instance, I’d mentioned my interest in Mudejar stars (a kind of Moorish visual design element) to a couple of friends, and sure enough, just a few days later, one of them emailed me this link to a podcast on that very topic. (To be honest, I hadn’t thought of looking for a podcast about Mudejar stars—I’d assumed it was just too obscure a topic for someone to dedicate an entire podcast. How wrong I was!)

The point is, social media and social networks are big players when researching online content, if only for the powerful effect that recommendations have on people. When you’re doing online research, your social network (and implicitly, all of the social media systems and tools) can be an incredibly valuable ally in your research. Your Personal Learning Network is the golden circle of friends. The players and the platforms may change over time, but it’s worth cultivating your personal network of friends-who-know that you can ask for help. That network should transcend the particularities of whatever platform happens to be in fashion at the time. (Anyone remember the MySpace social media site? You still have those friends, right?) In my studies of really extraordinarily skilled researchers, one striking thing I noticed was that they all had (and used) deep and broad Rolodexes, or what would today be called “social contact lists.”

Writing a mini-essay is useful to organize your thoughts

A useful strategic trick to get to a deeper understanding of your research question is to write up a mini-essay that presents all of your information and frames what it is you’re trying to figure out. I’m 99% convinced that having to write something down (and have that writeup make sense) is a great method to making sure that all of your ducks are in a row. If you’re being honest with yourself, you’ll pick up all KINDS of mistakes in your reasoning and data.

Naturally, the simplest, fastest way I know to write a mini-essay is a social one: send an email to a friend who shares your interest—ideally, someone who doesn’t know TOO much about the topic so you’re forced to explain the idea in some detail. In my case, I bombard friends with emails that start out “I bet you didn’t know that…” and then I write on and on about. The key thing is that in order to write that mini-essay (or email), YOU have to make sense of what you’ve found. You won’t just write gibberish to a friend (at least, I don’t recommend that), but you’ll see any gaps or inconsistencies in what you’ve discovered.

Content continues to grow in quantity and kind

The Joy of Search is also about the future of online content and how to be future-proof in your online research skills.

There’s every reason to believe that content will continue to grow, both in the amount of online content and the different kinds of content. A perpetual challenge as new kinds of resources become available will be how well they can be indexed. Although it doesn’t make much sense to create a new kind of online content that can’t be found by search engines or online catalogs, it happens every day, leaving unhappy researchers having to manually track down the content without the aid of an online index. One side effect is that media literacy will be an ever-evolving concept. How media is used will continue to change, and as new kinds of media evolve, so too will the way they’re used.

Content continues to splinter 

It’s not much of a prediction to point out the obvious— new content providers will arise, new media types will continue to be invented, and walled-gardens of all kinds will continue to operate and flourish. The side effect of these forces is that searchable content will continue to be in unsearchable silos. The good news here is that there are also shifts towards increasingly open access publication. But as the publishing industry continues to search for an effective funding model, we, the researchers, should expect information to still be in repositories, some of which are open, some of which are not. Some will require payment to read their content, others will be free and open to the public. The more you know about these trends, the more you know about what you can find and what’s possible to research online.

For instance, local historical societies and libraries often have great historical information. For more than one piece of research, I’ve used the “look for a county historical society” trick to locate a nearby cache of archival photos and materials. Keep that in mind when you’re searching for this kind of information. Often, their archival content is splintered offline or is difficult to search. A phone call and a visit in real-life will often give you great results through the help of friendly librarians and archivists.

And yet..

But at the same time, one of the surprises (and delights) of my work has been learning about the vast quantities of information that’s available on an immense variety of topics. Want to learn about different diseases of abalone  (Viral? Bacterial?), it’s simple to do. How about dressage style of the 16th century? Sure. Not a problem. Want to see 19th century records from Ellis Island immigration? That’s simple too. There is just an amazing amount of content online.

In other words, the kinds of research that used to be a huge hassle is now fairly straightforward as more content becomes available. This stuff is either “born digital” content, or becomes available as older content is scanned and indexed. That’s how you can learn about 16th century Italian dressage; the Google Books project scanned and then indexed the original text. Sure, it’s in Renaissance Italian, but if you’re not up on that, at least you’ve got the pictures.

One of the consequences of this is that new content is popping up all the time—new web sites appear minute-by-minute (there were 1.3 million new website domain names registered in the first three months of 2017, up 3.7% from 2016). 

New online applications let us see content in new ways (such as the InformationIsBeautiful.net site, which specializes in this kind of seeing-in-new-ways of data, or Google Earth VR, which lets you fly through a 3D model of the Earth, including many city buildingscapes).

And the side effect of that is that you can’t really keep up-to-date on what’s newest and greatest in your field. Instead, you’ll have to keep your eyes open, and periodically search for new content in your area of interest. We have shifted into an age of information triage—separating out what’s useful and important from the stuff that isn’t.

These skills are something we should all command. Having the methods of online search, and understanding the range of what’s possible to search for—that’s a potent combination. That’s what these stories are all about. 

May you search bravely, with skill and alacrity in the future.

Search on.  

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