A Beginning Guide to Anthropology Research on the Internet

• Library Catalogs
• Online Articles and Books
• Periodical Indices
• Virtual Web Reference Desks
• Subject-based Lists of Web Links
• Web Search Engines

Library Catalogs

Many colleges and universities have made their catalogs available for online access. While some may require a special program to access, increasingly they are designed for use with any web browser. The Academic Libraries web index Yahoo! lists nearly 400 academic libraries around the world including Harvard University and Cambridge University. LibWeb is even more comprehensive, listing 2000 libraries in 70 countries. These catalogs can help you locate books in your campus library and can help you find references that are not available locally (so that you can request them through interlibrary loan). Library catalogs are a good place to find out what resources are available for a term paper topic or a presentation. Often they will also tell you if the book you need is checked out and when it is due back to the library.

Not really a library catalog, but nearly as useful, are the web pages for booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. These sites allow you to search for books that are currently in print. They often provide a picture of the cover of the book and may include review comments and a table of contents. This can be particularly helpful if the book you need is not at your library and you don't have enough time to get it

Online Articles and Books

A number of books and articles are available directly on the internet. You can download them to a disk and read them at your leisure. While reading a book on a computer screen is not as pleasant as reading a physical book, it does have one advantage. With an online book, you can search for any word or phrase. This is useful if you think that the author mentions a topic that you are interested in, but you don't want to read the whole book to find a single phrase or paragraph. Because of copyright restrictions, most online books are older books whose copyrights have expired. It is a good place to look for works that are primarily of historical interest such as the works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, or Karl Marx. The Internet Public Library and The Online Books Pagelet you search thousands of online titles including books and shorter pieces. For books relating to the United States, try Making of America, a collection of 1,600 books and 50,000 articles relating to American social history published during the nineteenth century.

You will also find government publications online and publications of professional organizations such as the National Academy of Science. For example, you can download the entire CIA World Factbook for 1999, as well as the Library of Congress Country Studies Series. From the U.S. Census you can download the entire Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (or just the parts you need) in Adobe Acrobat format. Books and reports from the National Academy of Science Presstend to be more technical, but you can find some interesting titles such as "Lost Crops of the Incas: Little-Known Plants of the Andes with Promise for Worldwide Cultivation".

Periodical Indices

To locate recently published articles relating to a particular topic, check UnCover, a database of current article information taken from well over 17,000 multidisciplinary journals spanning the years from 1988 to the present. A relatively new web search site called NorthernLight allows you to search for magazine articles and order copies over the web. Recently the British Museum started The Anthropological Index Online. The Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent has a searchable Anthropology Bibliography that covers the field of Social Anthropology in the broadest sense. A number of anthropologists have put bibliographic information on the web. The anthropology Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo has links to many Bibliographies & Research Documents on particular topics that will be of interest to anthropologists.

Other indices such as the Social Sciences Periodical Index or Current Contents on the web are available as subscription services. However, many academic libraries subscribe to these services so you may be able to search them by connecting to your university library web page. For news items in newspapers and magazines there are a number of good search engines including NewsHub, Newstraker, and TotalNEWS.

Virtual Web Reference Desks

These are lists of web links to general reference materials. You will find dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, statistics, and other sources of obscure facts. My Virtual Reference Desk and Martindale's 'The Reference Desk' are the most extensive and complete. For a wide variety of facts and statistics try the Information Please Almanac. Good sources of information on other countries are the United Nations Infonation page and E-Conflict's World Encyclopedia. A good source of maps is National Geographic's Map Machine. Of particular interest to anthropology students is the Anthropology Review Database containing reviews of anthropological books, films & videos, audio recordings, software & multimedia, and on-line resources. The Anthropology Biography web page has capsule biographies for many of your favorite anthropologists and you can probably find the rest in Biography.com (although without pictures and with less detail). Finally the Ethnographic Atlas at the University of Kent provides summary descriptions of about 60 societies.

Subject-Based Lists of Web Links

These web pages provide links to web sites that pertain to a particular subject matter. The most famous, and most extensive list is Yahoo! Other good subject listings are About.com, Academic Info, GO Network, Snap, and StudyWeb. They classify web pages much like a library classifies books. If you are looking for web sites relating to a particular topic, Yahoo! is a good place to search. The most comprehensive list of mailing lists (conferences) is Liszt. For web pages that focus on specific subjects the two best collections of lists are the Argus Clearinghouse, and the World Wide Web Virtual Library (and especially, WWW Virtual Library: Anthropology, ArchNet - WWW Virtual Library - archaeology, VL - Archaeological Resource Guide for Europe, Virtual Library: Linguistics, Facets of Religion -- WWW Virtual Library, and Social Sciences WWW Virtual Library. For anthropology there are many good collections of links. Anthropology Resources on the Internet originally by Allen Lutens and now maintained by Bernard Clist is a regularly updated collection. Yahoo! also has a growing collection of Anthropology and Archaeology links. From these links you will have little difficulty finding more lists of links.

Web Search Engines

These tools search millions of web pages for terms or phrases. No one engine has indexed all of the web (estimated at over 40 million pages) so it is a good idea to check several or use a search engine that sends your query to several search engines. If Yahoo! is like a library in its subject classification of web sites, these tools are like cumulative indices of all of those sites. A search term will probably locate hundreds or thousands of pages unless it is very specific. Each search engine uses a slightly different format and each one has different options. Some of the search engines give you the flexibility of excluding terms from the search (for example, "documents with "anthropology" but not "archaeology""), narrowing the search to a part of the web page (just the title or just the hyperlinks), or broadening the search with wildcards (archaeo* finds archaeology, archaeologist, and archaeological). The search engines also differ in how they organize the results of the search. All the Web, All the Time, Altavista {http://www.altavista.com/}, Brightgate Metasearch, Excite, Ixquick Metasearch, Lycos, and NorthernLight are some of the better known engines. Deja.com allows you to search messages posted to thousands of usenet newsgroups. Since features and options are added regularly, you should check the instructions. For example, Altavista has added machine-translation capabilities to its search engine. Type a French web site address in and Altavista will translate the text on that page into English.