Continued from page 1Note that in most cases you will need to use a combination of many of the above as, unfortunately, the information you are looking for may be scatttered over several of these resources.
Talk to as many people as you can, read as many articles and sections of books, journals and databases on the animal you are interested in. Make notes and compare and then put it all together. If you do not quite understand something, hunt for more information on that particular topic, using one of the methods described.
You can also use the Internet in different ways. Indeed many search engines allow you to perform searches using keywords to find information. Do not limit yourself to just one search engine. Use several of them as what may not be found on one, may be present on another one.
Below are some of the more extensive DB you can search on the Internet
Check how they want you to use search or keywords (they usually have help files that explain the type of searches you can perform and how to structure them to narrow the searches to what you are really interested in so that what is returned as a result is as close to the topic you are searching for.
- http://www.altavista.com
- http://www.yahoo.com
- http://www.infoseek.com
- http://www.webcrawler.com
- http://www.excite.com
- http://www.lycos.com
- and their are many others
If the results you obtain are not satisfactory, you may need to use different key words. For instance if a search for Elegance coral returns nothing of interest, try Catalaphyllia. You will need to be a little creative and structure your search in such a manner that returns relevant info and not a lot of extraneous material you have no interest in.
Again perform searches on several databases not just one one. This applies to the Internet ones, but also to the specialized hobby ones which are often found on message boards of hobby related web sites that have mailing lists and maintain a database of everything that was posted.
In this respect our own DB has tens of thousands of messages stored on over 1800 topics, totalling over 70 megabytes of information at http://www.athiel.com
You can also access DB of newsgroups and see what you can find there.
In general, you need to be aware that to get a real good set of answers, several searches are required and that you will need to compare what you find. Some recommendations may seem contradictory. When that is the case further clarification is necessary. Posting to a mailing list on the net and asking more questions, putting forth what you have found and asking for further opinions is a good way to go.
This is an overview of what can be done, let's now log on to the Internet and start doing some searches so you can visually get an idea of what I mean.
The talk proceded and ended with a number of actual searches using both existing web sites that were hobby related and DB sites such as the ones mentioned.
What impressed several attendees the most was that one could start with one hobby related web site, go to the articles they list and save those to your local disk as a first step. Then you could move on to the area where they list links and go to those web sites. Each of these has not only articles but yet another set of links to other web sites and on.
Believe me, if you take the time, you will find the information you are interested in.
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