University 113 Spring 2005

ML 251 Tu-Th: 2:30-3:50 PM

Technological Disasters and Catastrophes

"If anything can go wrong, it will."

Murphy's Law

Internet searching

Most Rice students are very familiar with internet searching. Of the various search engines on the web, our favorite is google.com. Our experience is that when one does a google search you get more results than you can deal with. The advanced search features can be very helpful in reducing the number of results to a manageable number.

There is a lot of junk on the internet. You should not believe too much of what you find on the internet. Selection 1 of your packet has an article on making quality judgements about material you find. A collection of short articles on evaluating sources can be found here and from Religion 291 here.

Fondren Library

Databases

The Rice library has available an number of databases for which it pays. You can enter this area here. Probably the most useful for you will LexisNexis, which can be found as Academic Universe in the multidisciplinary section. Also in this section and very useful is ArticleFirst giving access to journal articles. ReadersGuideRetrospective gives some historical access to popular magazine articles. You might find the StudentResearchCenterGold site useful.

Rice is a US government depository library and as such has microform and/or physical copies of much authoritative information. Many of these items are in WebCat (I don't know how to bookmark it. This leads to the main library page. You can go from there). In addition there is the governmental section of the database area.

Books

Fondren has lots of books and journals. It is well worthwhile to search WebCat for any subject of interest.