Searching Strategies

Supreme Court Chamber; by Carol M. Highsmith

Here are some suggestions for finding resources beyond the ones listed on this website:

WorldCat

You can access WorldCat by typing www.worldcat.org into your browser or by clicking on its name in the quick links column on the right.  You could begin by typing United States Supreme Court in the search box, but that produces tens of thousands of results.  You can then limit the results by format in the column to the left of the search results.  Clicking on the box next to book, encyclopedia, downloadable article, or DVD would reduce the list of results to only materials in the specified format.  

You can also refine your results using the options listed below the format choices. If you want the most up-to-date information, click on the most recent year to view only the books published in that year.  Be careful though- you can overlook sources that might still be valuable but were published in previous years.  In the content category, you can limit the results by biography, fiction, or non-fiction.  For this topic, you will probably want to look at both non-fiction and biographies.  In the audience category you can specify materials for a juvenile or non-juvenile audience.

When you find a promising resource, click on the title to see its full profile.  You can find other, related materials by using the "more like this" feature on the right side of the window.  The item's subject terms are displayed.  Clicking on one of them takes you to a list of more resources with the same subject term.

Clicking on "United States -- Supreme Court -- Encyclopedias" gives you this list of results:

Some of the subject terms that worked well for my search included:


United States -- Supreme Court
United States -- Supreme Court -- History
United States -- Politics and Government
United States -- Supreme Court -- Biographies
United States -- Supreme Court -- Encyclopedias
Law -- United States -- Cases
Constitutional Law -- United States

INSPIRE

INSPIRE is a database that is provided by the Indiana State Library, and it can be accessed online at no charge by anyone in Indiana.  The web address is inspire.in.gov, or there is a hyperlink to it in the quick links column on the right.  To conduct a basic search, type a keyword or phrase, such as "United States Supreme Court," in the search box.  For this search, it is helpful to select the "government" checkbox in the list of subjects underneath the search box.  Clicking "search" will produce a list of results.  

An alternate basic search can be done by searching by database.  Click on "search by database," type in a key word or phrase, and select an appropriate database such as the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia or Military and Government Collection.

Search Engines

Be careful when using a search engine such as Google.  A simple keyword search will result in thousands of websites with questionable accuracy.  In order to find information on government websites only, you should type in a keyword or phrase followed by site:.gov.  This limits the results to only websites ending in .gov, so they should be reliable and accurate.

Your Local Library

You can find additional books and resources at your local library.  In your library's catalog, try subject terms such as United States Supreme Court, federal judicial branch, separation of powers, and checks and balances.  The official Dewey Decimal number for books about the Supreme Court is 347.7326.  Some of the other call numbers related to this topic are: 342.029, 342.73, and 347.732634.  Don't forget to ask a reference librarian for help.  They can show you additional reference sources and introduce you to subscription databases the library pays for that can connect you to other excellent sources of information.