My Experiences on Research

During the course of the semester, I had to search for very 'old' original source material. It was extremely hard to find information at first. It was similar to finding a needle in a haystack. But it was not until the end of the semester until I finally realized and figured the correct way to find sources that seem impossible to find. Listed below are a few hints that maybe of help to anyone attempting to find old articles in the UT library system.
 
  1. Find various bibliography citings for the same article.
  2. When searching for the proceedings of a symposium or conference, use the name of the conference as the 'Author'.
  3. Use the Mixed Keywords search inside UTnetCat to allow for more advance searches.
  4. Use the date limiter to narrow your search.
  5. If you are looking for a particular year of the conference, do a general search for the conference. Look at the "Older Volumes" section to make sure you check to see which library that parrticular volume you are looking is located at.
  6. If you encounter funny acronym and nothing comes up with the search, try using the Mixed Keyword search to see what the full name of the conference is and search by that. If that does not work, use a outside search engine like www.google.com to find out what the abbreviations stand for.
  7. Sometime the internet can point you to different bibliographical citations of the same article.
I hope the tips I've listed above help. Good luck!