Content Searching

Going on a content hunt

• Open your favorite browser window (or several).

• Open your favorite text editor as a scratch pad, you'll want to copy/paste links from the browser and make notes.

Simply relying on browser history or bookmarking is probably not the best strategy, you'll want to capture your findings and get them recorded on the wiki at the end of your search. Editing directly into a wiki page is also less-than-ideal as you don't want to get distracted by formating and the like while the hunt is on.

• If you are doing this collaboratively (in real-time) you'll probably want to open an IRC chat session on a suitable channel.

Focused content hunt

You've got an idea of what sort of content you want to find.

Searching with your favorite search engine on carefully chosen terms is likely to return a lot of links, and you can't necessarily visit them all. One good strategy is to use this search to find super-nodes from which to do more focused browsing. For health and science content: government agencies/ministries, NGO's, patient and research advocacy groups and universities are all likely to have produced suitable content or gathered together links to high-quality content. Furthermore, as these are all generally non-profit organizations, the chances of finding content that is (or can be) made available under suitable licensing terms are substantially improved.

Surprise content discovery

Sometimes when you are looking for one thing, you stumble across something else entirely. Serendipity is a wonderful thing. Open a fresh text window and paste the link with some notes on topic, copyright, that will allow you (or someone else) pick up that thread. If you working collaboratively with a group on a focused content hunt, it's best not to get distracted by another topic, no matter how rich a vein of content you've found; but don't lose track of it either. It could become the starting point of a new focused content hunt you launch later on, or you can drop it onto an appropriate wiki page for someone else to follow up.