The Vietnam War
A lesson in Search Strategy, Website Evaluation and Citing Sources

Ms. Churnside has asked you to locate information about the Vietnam War especially from the soldiers' point of view. As you read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien you will get in touch with the experiences of the soldiers in the trenches and jungles through the items that were in the bags on their backs.

The purpose of this page will be to give you some tips for locating the information you need, evaluating it after you found it and citing it when you decide to use it.

Search Strategies

Let's begin at OSLIS with tips on Search Strategies. You will find lots of helpful information there to get you started.

Here are a couple of magazine articles, one located in MAS Ultra (EBSCO) and the other in Student Resource Center (INFOTRAC). The search strategy used to locate both of these articles was "vietnam war" AND memories

1. "War memories still haunt" (Vietnam) Fox, Tom. National Catholic Reporter, April 28, 2002, p.20 http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/SRC/hits?c=4&secondary=false&docNum=A62087487&sidebars=Yes&bConts=40&bucket=8&origSearch=false&t= RK&s=2&r=d&n=10&l=dp&locID=euge35960&KE=%22vietnam+war%22+and+memories

2. "Vietnam memories" (cover story) Schwarzkopf, H. NormanNewsweek, September 28, 1992, p60
http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9209280412&db=ulh

Here are a couple of websites located through a search of google. The search strategy used was "vietnam war" AND memories AND soldier Even using three terms to narrow the search resulted in 15,000 hits.

1. Vietnam Memories. Bill Janes
http://www.vietmemories.com/

2. War Stories! Library
http://www.war-stories.com/warstory-featured.htm

3. Veterans' Oral History Project
http://www.natickvets.org/vietnam.html

Website Evaluation

OSLIS also has guidelines for evaluating web pages.

Here are a few websites representing the different points of view about the Vietnam War. The search strategy varied in this case. The following terms were crossed with "vietnam war"

1. Hell's Half Acre: a Vietnam War Page
http://hometown.aol.com/rtoartilleryfo/hellshalfacre.html

2. Vietnam War Leaves Unanswered Questions: the missing peace
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/features/specialsections/vietnam/intro.htm

3. Thanks to the Vietnam War Protesters
http://knossos.shu.edu/HyperNewsV/get/vp/protest/4/1/1.html

4. Vietnam Controversy
http://www.1stcavmedic.com/vietnam_controversy.html

Citing Sources

Again, OSLIS provides an interactive works cited form that will help you create your bibliography or works cited page with appropriate punctuation and format. Go to the Interactive Works Cited Form site, select two sources above and complete the citation for each.

If you cite a magazine article you need to click the radio button for Online Databases. Notice that when you click Show Me one of the fields for citing magazine articles online is the URL for the article. The URL is shown above in red. As a heads up, be mindful in the future that you need to capture this information (the url) at the time you are at the article online.