Locating and Retrieving Relevant Information
The first thing to do is to decide exactly what your information need is, as you will use information in different ways for different purposes. If you are about to start a substantial piece of research, e.g., for your dissertation, you will need to do a systematic literature search where a wide variety of material may have to be consulted; alternatively, you may simply want to check the systematic name for salmon. Commonly, you will need something in between, but the same general principles for literature searching apply, although your search will not need to be so comprehensive or exhaustive.
Before using the relevant research tools you will need to determine what kind of resources you need. Are you looking for scholarly articles? Is it important that you use a range of source material? Do you only need to provide a broad overview of a topic? Are you looking for print based or electronic resources or both?
Catalogues, indexes, online databases and the Internet are all tools you will use in your search for information. Once you have decided upon the sources you wish to find you will then need to search the relevant tool.
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