ANT 250: Conservation Anthropology: Researching your Conservation Topic

Search the library catalog for materials on your topic (books, ebooks, videos, government documents). Many book records in URSUS include the table of contents, which can give you a sense of a book and help you decide if it would be useful for your research. Not sure where to locate an item in the library? There are maps on all floors of the library and at the reference desk.

There are many ways to hack Google, in order to conduct more complex searches and focus your results. In the above example:

• intitle: refers to any terms you want to ensure are in the title of the web page itself (in this case, that would be "climate change")
• the quotation marks around climate change hold those words together so that Google searches for that exact phrase (rather than a search that returns the word climate or the word change)
• ~coast tells the search that you want terms related to the word right after the tilde (~); for coast, this might include terms like coastal, coastline, waterfront, shoreline, and seaside
• The minus sign in front of Alaska tells the search to exclude Alaska-related terms from your results 
• site:.gov tells Google that you only want results from government websites; you can also use specific sites after site:, such as site:bangordailynews.com or site:maine.edu
• The date limiter can be found in the Tools section of your Google search (the Tools section is linked directly below and to the right of the search bar)

For your ANT 250 projects, you may want to search Google using site:.gov to locate government information on your topics, such as climate change or ecotourism or waste management.

Use the Fogler database menu to identify online databases where you might find research that addresses your topic. Several databases that will be a good place to start are: