Research is a terrible thing. It’s difficult to know when to stop collecting data, especially on the Internet. You can quickly overwhelm your browser’s Favorites or Bookmarks list with dozens of URLs, most of which, a week later, you can’t remember why you kept them. If you’re going to get any value out of all the cyber-loot that you bring home, you need to make your collection time-resistant.
Here’s the key: data is not information. Raw data is just stuff; a big box of seemingly unrelated amorphous odds and ends. To be useful, data must be processed, organized, and stored in such a way that it means something to you and is easily retrievable.
Let’s say that a few months ago you wanted to see the flag carried by U. S. marines in China during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900-01. You searched the Internet, found a nice graphic at a site called Flags of the World, and saved the site information in your browser’s Favorites with the name "FOTW".
I don’t know about you, but I’d forget what this meant in a couple of days. Even the full name, Flags of the World, might not mean much to me if I had marked several flag sites for different reasons.
Instead of cluttering up my Web browser, I keep Word files for each research project, plus separate ones for writing-related sites, hobbies, friend’s home pages, and so forth. Each alphabetized file requires only a few seconds to open and paste in a URL. If want to find one already there, I can scan for it, click the URL and go directly to the site. (Depending on your browser, you may have to copy the URL and paste it directly into the browser’s address line instead.)
A useful entry might look like this:
| SITE NAME | CONTENTS | URL |
| Flags of the World | Thousands of flags, in color, plus their history | http://fotw.digibel.be/flags/ |
Make it easy on yourself, take a couple of extra minutes and organize as you collect. Give the sites names that will mean something to you years from now and alphabetize the list. Write down what’s there, that is, why you saved the site the day you found it. If the URLs are too long to fit in one line, you can turn the page sideways (landscape) or use a smaller font size. Whatever suits your style. You can come back to a list like the one above six months later and quickly find any specific URL. That’s the goal, find facts fast.
Newer browsers will also let you copy an entire Web page onto your hard drive, graphics and all. It remains a Web file (HTM extension) and can be opened without accessing the Internet. Copying Web pages for future reference can be useful if your Internet time is limited or you have a poor local connection, but you need an organized system of folders (directories) to hold them. As with URL files, names for both folders and files should make their contents instantly clear to you regardless of how much time has passed. Opening files on your own hard drive just to see what’s in them is a waste of time.
If you copy an entire Web page to your computer, you might also see a new subfolder that came along with it. This contains files necessary to display the Web page as it was designed. For example, a Web page named "Famous Cats in History" might come with a subfolder named "famous_cats". If you looked in the subfolder, you’d see graphics files (GIF and JPG extensions) and maybe a CSS file.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. This is a development shortcut for the Web creator. Rather than hand-coding every style directly into dozens of HTML files, over and over again, the developer can define each style one time in a CSS file and then have all the HTML files reference it. If a style is changed for some reason, the developer only has to change the definition in the CSS, and all HTML files that reference it will automatically be updated. If a CSS file piggybacks in with a Web page download, just ignore it. It’s a friendly critter.
Summary: Data must be processed and properly stored to become useful information. A little time spent organizing at the beginning of a project can make a big difference latter on.