Northern Star Online: Library databases make research easier, more reliable than Google

An Internet search can provide vast amounts of specific information, but not without sifting through piles of distracting data.

For example, if you wanted to find information on the Civil War Battle of Antietam and you went to Google, you would find about 575,000 results. That’s quite a lot of information to wade through, and it may or may not be usable.
Most likely, you won’t get through more than four or five pages of results. The Antietam search is also on the small end of what you will usually find using Google; sticking with historical battles, the Battle of Marathon pulls down 2.3 million, and the general term of World War II - try 183 million.

Since the Google search algorithms use page views and external links to rank their results, chances are extremely good that an off-the-beaten path source with some really good information is probably hidden behind hundreds of thousands of other so-so sources that you will never wade through.

So, if Google is giving you information overload, where can a self-respecting student go to get good information for a research paper?

Enter the NIU University Libraries article database, a massive repository of quality sources easily available to students.

Remember my first search, the Battle of Antietam? Well, after perusing the history section of the NIU library database, I came across a database entitled “Civil War Letters and Diaries.” Within 20 seconds, I found about 100 letters and diary entries, written by Civil War soldiers and civilians, that mentioned the Battle of Antietam. How’s that for some primary source material? Imagine trying to sift through the 575,000 results on Google and come up with something as rock solid as that.

Besides its own extremely thorough collection of sources, the NIU library database also provides thousands of starting points that lead to other credible sources of information.

In my Antietam example, I did a page search on the history section of the database for the terms “Civil War,” (press ctrl+f in your browser and type in your query; very useful when you are trying to find a specific term in a long document). I found, near the bottom of the page, a link to a huge Civil War database maintained by the University of Tennessee.

All of these results are what I found under one section of the history database. This is only a small example of what awesome power you can wield with this database at your fingertips. The databases include everything from the history section we’ve already explored, medical terminology, social studies, legal information, math and statistics and everything in between.

Granted, the NIU database can seem a little overwhelming at first, just like a random Internet search, but the distinct and clear advantages it has over just a simple search engine are huge. For starters, all the sources are legitimate, which is usually a huge time sink for anyone researching on the Internet.

Secondly, the information is sorted very well, allowing you to quickly and efficiently find exactly what you need.

To access the database, head to www.ulib.niu.edu, click on “Students,” then click on “Find Information” and then “Articles and more.” The process is slightly different based on whether you are on-campus or accessing it from another location, but the general steps are the same.

Note that you will have to login using your Z-ID number if you are off-campus, but once you have done that, you are off and running. Just remember to cite your sources.