Information Skills

Search Techniques

Unsure how to find information? Confused about where to look for material for your assignments? Don't know where to start?

This guide from Southampton University will help with the following:

• Learning how to form a search strategy
• Learning how to get more or less results
• Learning about wildcards

The Southampton guide mentions Boolean operators which are embedded into the Advanced search on HOLLY to make things a bit simpler. Have a look at this demonstration of a HOLLY advanced search.

You can find more demonstrations on the Library Services page on the Learning Hub,

Can't think of alternative keywords? Try using Visuwords, an online graphical thesaurus and dictionary. 

Useful tools and links

• American Idle: Information sources - a video spoof on comparing information sources.

Evaluating Information

You need to make sure that the information you use in assignments will help you gain marks, not lose them!

The following links will help you decide whether the information you are looking at is suitable and reliable:

Bob and a cat at the Open University suggest you ask who, why and where before trusting what you read online

A bit more detail on the questions to ask from Oxford Brookes University

If you prefer a flow chart to take you through the process this one is from Cardiff University