"No, I don't have any more freakin' questions," I thought as my professor scanned the room with a hopeful look on his face. It was 11:28 A.M. and my research paper was due in 72 minutes. At 11:31 A.M., I booked it for the Coor Computing Commons and stood in line until 11:39 A.M. I finally plopped down on a chair, logged in and Googled my topic.
Unfortunately, it turned out that Wikipedia did not have a convenient summary of what I needed. Panic set in - it is a well-known fact that if you cannot find it on Wikipedia.org, your prospects are not looking up. At 12:26 P.M., I was still asking Jeeves, with only a paragraph of my 2-page essay done.
However, I learned an important lesson that day. No, I did not realize that I should get started on my work earlier. That's not how I roll. I learned that efficiency in research is the most important tool for a student.
Unfortunately, most of us are terrible at it.
"Students have no idea what resources are available to them," said Libby Anderson, a Hayden Library specialist. "There are so many tools out there to figure out how to research your subjects, it can be confusing."
So I looked into basic research methods and found that there are some alternatives to Google and even Wikipedia (well, maybe).
To reach the first great source of knowledge, you have to be willing to ignore the aesthetic pleasure the nipple can bring and be ready to go downstairs. Once you reach the bottom floor of Hayden Library, get on a computer and bask in the glory of the library home page.
Turn your attention to the "Journals" heading, and click on the List of Publishers and Packages on the right hand side of the screen. There, my friend, is where information ranging from the local news in Wyoming (courtesy of Lexis-Nexis) to 45-page reports about gnat mating rituals (from the online archive of Nature journals) resides.
If you have any trouble finding any material, chat with a librarian online. It works like magic (or any other kind of instant messenger). It takes about 30 seconds for a staff member to come on and show you how and where to get exactly what you need. You can also use the service from any other location with Internet access.
If you have less formal academic research to conduct, do it with three search engines at once and let other people interested in the subject help you along. That's the idea behind metasearch engines like www.ixquick.com and www.mamma.com, and Web 2.0 searching communities like www.url.com.
Founded by a Stanford graduate student, www.url.com shows a Web site by its ranking by both search pages like Yahoo!, Google and MSN as well as what other users found to be the most helpful.
According to Trevor Knauf, the company's marketing coordinator and an ASU alumnus, "There is only a 7 percent overlap between search engine results, so it's hard to trust just one engine."
This type of Web site relies on a community of users and collective intelligence to help users navigate through all the possible sources.
"It saves a lot of time by eliminating irrelevant sifting of information," Knauf said.
When you're in a time bind (judging from the number of people in the computer labs around lunchtime, that probably means you), assertive and comparative research are the way to go when the clock is ticking.
Lucia Bill is a certified procrastinator and path-of-least-resistance enthusiast. Reach her at: lucia.bill@asu.edu.
