Chapter 10. THE PRINCIPLE OF THE WORLD BEYOND

The Principle of the World Beyond: When doing your research online it's essential to remember that there's a world beyond the Internet. Web pages are generated by people, and sometimes people are the most valuable search resources you can find.

I have had many successful searches where I didn't find my search result on a Web page at all. Instead, I found a Web site that contained contact information for a person who could answer my question. Sometimes, instead of an answer in glorious HTML, that's all you need.

Where you'll find an expert varies. Sometimes when you're searching you'll stumble upon a Web page of someone who might know the answer to a complicated or possibly ambiguous question. Once I was helping a friend with a paper she was writing on the subsonic communications of elephants. She had a complex question about subsonic elephant communication research, and we were having a difficult time answering it until we found the Web page of a professor of zoology who had done such research. She answered the question, the paper was completed, and the A grade obtained.

Other times you might want to deliberately search for an expert. There are two ways you can do this: you can find associations (which often have representatives who can answer questions), or you can use one of the many online indexes of experts. If you have a very obscure field of research, you can also resort to a full-text search engine, but I would do that only as a last resort.

Before I point out some resources, though, I want to remind you of your responsibility as a questioner. Follow these five rules for contacting an expert.