When starting a trip, you need an idea of what's out there and where you want to go. We call the first stage of the research process "background research" and it starts by figuring out what information is out there and what you want to find out.
The GOAL of this step is to get an idea of what is out there, to gather key terms, and to get ready to develop your topic.
Searching on Google will often pull up related articles on Wikipedia. Once you get to a helpful Wikipedia article, look through the outline and notice the different areas.
Remember, not everything on Wikipedia will be helpful or even true! At this point, you're gathering general information that you can use to find sources. Don't use Wikipedia as a source in your project.
This gif shows the Wikipedia entry for "Fula peoples," highlighting the Contents categories and demonstrating how you can examine related pages by hovering over highlighted words in the text.
TigerSearch looks through almost all of our library holdings. Use this search to figure out what kind of sources different keywords and phrases pull out. On the results page, you can also limit to source type (for example, newspapers) or limit to a certain time period.
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