I discovered how much information is available online during this exercise. After an exhausting forty-five minutes of my eyes glued to the screen of my Macbook, I was able to untangle the web that these spiders make while searching for this information.
1) An op-ed on a labor dispute involving public school teachers from before 1970
This article highlights the voting and decisions based on New York City school teachers negotiations with employers regarding working conditions in the 1960’s. I started my search on JSTOR, which I had never used before. I typed in key words using the + sign to indicate that I needed a long description of words. I typed in “1960’s,” “op-ed,” “teacher,” and “labor dispute” and scanned by year and title. When I saw New York City + public schools I scanned the article and thought it applied.
- This process was relatively fast.
2) The first documented use of solar power in the United States
- I started my search using google and typing in “ Solar Energy” and “US Department of Energy.” I figured The US Dept. of Energy would be the best source to find an archived document of solar energy.
- I could not find anything on google so I then proceeded to use jstor.
- Information from the 1980’s was prominent in each search so I went down the page and found this source from Jstor: Eisenhower’s Solar Energy Policy outline which stated that talks of solar energy actually began in the 1950’s.
- http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3376913?searchUrl=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DUS%2Bdepartment%2Bof%2Benergy%2B%252B%2Bfirst%2Bdocument%2Bof%2Bsolar%2Benergy%26acc%3Doff%26wc%3Don&Search=yes&uid=3739936&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101040282243
3) The best resource for the history of California ballot initiatives, including voting data
While using google scholar, I typed in “California” + “ballot initiatives” and hoped for the best. I remembered that this past summer, when asked to find statistics for certain states, I found the best resource to be the state’s actual government site that highlights all of their laws and voting history. Easily enough, after I searched what I had orginially asked google for, I was sent to this link, http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/init_history.pdf.
- I’m not sure if this is the exact document that is needed for voting data in CA, but it gave a detailed summary of the history of initiatives in the state.