Start Here: How do I pick the right materials for my research?

Why? Very current, many different perspectives & opinions, very specific topic coverage, easy and cheap to find information. 
Why not? Internet information may -- or may not -- be reliable, authoritative.  Hard to tell who or why someone writes about a topic. Information online may be changed frequently (e.g. Wikipedia).

Use the other FIT Library’s research guides as starting-off points on various topics such as Business, Careers, or Textile Industry.

Need more help with an Internet search? Ask the Library: by chat, email, in person, or by phone.

A WEBSITE can be anything--reliable, misleading, informative, confusing--that someone puts on the Internet. Use some of these tips to help decide if a website you find can give you the information you need, especially if you are looking for material for a research paper or project.

DATABASES, as the word is used in most libraries, refers to sites that usually:

• are paid for by the library so that students or other members of the group can use it at no extra charge (as opposed to websites that could be free or require payment or membership). Access is limited to people who have current affiliation with that college or library.
• contain content from selected reputable sources such as newspaper and magazine articles, statistical sources, material from books
• are mostly material unavailable for free elsewhere online
• can be material reprinted (with permission) from material originally in print, or can be written specifically for the database
• are not completely searchable from Google or other search engines; you must first access FIT databases through a link from on our website where you will be asked to log in with your currently-valid FIT user name and password
• might be the best place to find free-to-you scholarly, trade, or general interest articles, the text of reference books, market research and other hard-to-get-to material.

When your professor says to use materials other than just websites for your research --in an effort to expand where you might tend to look on your own--they probably doesn't mean to exclude library databases. Ask them to clarify, and/or ask us if you're not sure!