CMJ 107: Communication and the Environment: Getting Started

You can use the Fogler database menu to identify online databases where you might find research that addresses your environmental communication topic, whether environmental restoration, food sovereignty, or a topic of your choosing. Several databases that are a good place to start, based on your topics, are:

Try Subject-Specific Search Options

Use the following online catalogs to find books (or videos, microforms, etc.) on your topic:

• URSUS
  Begin with URSUS, the University of Maine System library catalog, that also includes holdings from the Bangor Public Library, Maine State Library, Maine State Archives, and Maine State Law & Legislative Reference Library.
• MaineCat
  If you want to broaden your search beyond the University of Maine system, you can search the Maine statewide catalog.
• WorldCat
  Want to see what else has been written on your topic? WorldCat is a directory of books held in libraries across the country and in many parts of the world.

For example:

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:nytimes.com
• 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)