Using Web Resources

Context

The Web now provides unparalleled access to information from around the globe. Anyone can make information available on the Web, and therein lays one of the issues. How do we discriminate when searching for information, ensuring that what we use in our research is both valid and accurate.

Content

Most people start their Web searching via the Google search engine, so much so that we now talk about 'googling' for something. There are strategies to use when using Google so that we can be effective and productive.

Search terms

The search terms you enter and the order in which you enter them affect both the order and the type of pages that appear in your search results. When Google detects very common words such as where, do, I, for, and a, known as stop words, it ignores them so Google may return relevant results. Avoid using words that you might associate with your topic, but you wouldn't expect to find on the designated page(s). For example, queries that include "articles about," "discussion of," "documentation on," and "pages about" are likely to return fewer results since information on the web is rarely labeled with such terms. For best results, use a few precise words.

Google Operators

There are specific terms you can use to restrict Google searches, for example:

• When you put a word or phrase in quotation marks “”, the results will only include pages with the same words in the same order as what is inside the quotation marks.

• Add an asterisk within a search as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms.

• If you want to search for pages that may have just one of several words, include OR (capitalised) between the words. Without the OR, your results would typically show only pages that match both terms.

• ’’allintext’’: Find pages where all the terms appear in the text of the page.

• ’’allintitle’’: Find pages where all the terms appear in the title of the page.

Web page authors

Finding the author of a website is very important if you're writing a paper or doing a project that requires citations or a bibliography. This information can be difficult to determine, however, especially if the website you're looking at isn't exactly article-based. Here are some ideas to find the author of the website you're using:

Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Look for the website's copyright information. You should see the author (or authoring company) next to the copyright date. Try checking the website's About page. This page is full of information about the website's history, mission statement, and hopefully its author. You can usually find it at either the very top or very bottom of the page. Check the Contact page. If it's not a company, the author's name should be listed, along with an email or phone number. If it is a company, there should still be someone you can contact to ask about who authored the website. Finding the author is the first stage. If you want to use the information as part of your research then you do need to establish the credentials of the author. There may be information on the About page, or you might need to do a Google search on the author to find out more about them. This also applies if the page is authored by an institution or organisation (although you may know who they are already). Scholarly authors placing information on the web will probably have made all of this easy for you ... but sometimes it can take a long time to be really certain of the veracity of the information you find.

Veracity

As we are talking about history, you should also remember that information presented on the Web as in that presented on paper, is not necessarily factual. It can be opinion, argument, or edited such that you are not aware of the original. More and more people are accepting the Web as a source of factual information without any discrimination or corroboration.

Referencing Web Pages

When you find information on the Web it is important to note down the reference details straight away. The Web is dynamic with people updating their pages or removing their pages all the time. What you find one day might have changed or gone the next day. The information you need to correctly reference a webpage is:

The author (see above); the date the page was last modified (usually at the bottom of the page - use undated if there isn't one); the page title (usually at the top of the page); the full Web address (url) of the page; and the date you viewed the page.

The reference then looks like this:

Spires, K. (2017) Nursing as Part of the British Army [WWW] http://britisharmynurses.com/index.php/nursesandnursing/nursing Links to an external site. accessed August 2017

note the [WWW] to indicate it is a web reference.

Useful Web resources

The British Army Nurses site http://britisharmynurses.com

The Royal British Nurses Association database http://www.kingscollections.org/nurses/home

Scarlet Finders, Sue Light's informative site, mainly on nursing in the Great War http://www.scarletfinders.co.uk

This Intrepid Band, Sue Light's Blog http://greatwarnurses.blogspot.co.uk

The Fairest Force Sue Light's new site on Nursing in WW1 http://www.fairestforce.co.uk/index.html

RCN Historical Journals, a searchable database of nursing journals http://www.rcn.org.uk/development/library_and_heritage_services/library_collections/rcn_archive/historical_nursing_journals

The National Archives http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk 

The UK Association for the History of Nursing http://ukahn.org

The QARANC Association, the official website of the QARANC http://www.qarancassociation.org.uk

The Museum of Military Medicine https://museumofmilitarymedicine.org.uk