Blog post
Finding Information about Planning: What Do Faculty Do?
Planning students are often told to find good information. How to do that is becoming both simpler, due to various search engines and databases, and more complex, given the amount of information available.
Planning students are often told to find good information. How to do that is becoming both simpler, due to various search engines and databases, and more complex, given the amount of information available. The following tips represent what I (and many other faculty members) actually do to find out about new things.
- Know something already. If you know something about the field you'll make better search decisions. You'll know key authors and organizations. I read a lot which makes searching easier. I also own a number of standard reference books--on topics from planning and design to social theory and research methods. I subscribe to and/or regularly read a number of magazines and journals. My list is a variation on the one offered by Rutgers faculty member Stuart Meck in a response to my last blog. It performs a similar function by giving me a place to start.
- Use specialist encyclopedias or dictionaries. The International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences (ed. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, 2001, Elsevier) has lots of entries on urban studies and planning and many university libraries subscribe to its online version. Entries are written by knowledgeable academics. I own dictionaries and encyclopedias of statistics, geography, philosophy, and architecture. They help me find out about key ideas and major thinkers in a subfield or on a topic--from social capital to Chonbach's alpha.
- Use specialist databases. University libraries subscribe to many databases--a favorite of mine is the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals that includes quite a lot of planning articles (though not some from newer journals). In addition, as Stuart Meck mentioned in his ealier comment, there are several important online databases in planning. These include the TRB's Transportation Research Information Service (TRIS) and the HUD USER Database: http://www2.huduser.org/portal/bibliodb/pdrbibdb.html
http://tris.trb.org/. - Learn to be a sophisticated user of the internet. If I need academic sources I like using the databases that my library subscribes to but Google Scholar (not plain Google) is a good place to start if time is short. I particularly appreciate being able to enter a classic reference and see who cited it. The Berkeley libraries have an excellent guide to help you find and read web sites: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html. Particularly useful is their section on evaluating web pages: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html. They have great tips about how to evaluate the URL itself, assess information on the page perimeter, look for sources, and use reviews. This is basically what faculty do when they read web pages.
- Put ".edu" in with the search terms in an internet search to make extra sure you'll get some university web pages. University centers and institutes often have useful overview materials.
- Ask reference librarians how to find things. They can be helpful. I've learned a lot from them--particularly those specializing in images, maps, and statistical data.
Topics
- A Transit Agency Showdown, and You Have the Power to Choose the Winner
- A Surprising Place for Climate Relocation: Washington State
- Little Projects Make a Big Difference in American Downtowns
- NACTO to Help Five Cities Design and Build Low-Carbon Transportation Infrastructure
- Support for Shrinking the Nation's Oldest Growth Boundary
- Design Thinking Needs a Broader Perspective
- Analyzing Lynch's City Imageability in the Digital Age
- Breaking News: California's Transit Oriented Upzoning Bill Stuck in Limbo
- And Now, Some Good News for the Environment
- The Story of Ballparks Is the Story of American Cities
- The Wonderful World of Vicious Circles
- As EV Sales Soar, Transportation Emissions Continue to Increase
- Oakland's Adaptive Bike Share Program
- Monday Map: Water Infrastructure in New Orleans
- Ban on Living and Sleeping in Vehicles Approved in San Diego
- Four Bus-Only Lanes Under Consideration Around Los Angeles
- The Boring Company Gets Paid
- Too Much Spending on New Projects, Not Enough on Maintenance
- New York to Consider Fines for Distracted Walking
- 'Fairbnb' Attempts to Right the Wrongs of Short-Term Rentals
