Now that you have had firsthand experience searching out resources and information pertaining to the Jobs with Justice campaign, or perhaps the actual sites where the conflict is taking place, here are some more advanced tips you can use to find exactly what you are looking for (assuming it is available and accessible over the Internet).

Given the relative advantages and disadvantages of the various information outlets, you will probably want to use them all. For example, you may want to search for a couple of books on American labor history or labor conflicts in general. You would certainly want to review recent news stories about these labor conflicts from numerous perspectives, while also monitoring news stories as they appear in recent editions of both local and national newspapers and periodicals. You can start by simply typing a few keywords into the simple text search on each magazine or periodical's website. For example, you might start by searching for specific information on "labor relations", "workers' rights", "living wage", the "National Labor Relations Board", "AFL-CIO", or the "Golden Trashcan Award" (if you've done your homework, you may already know what this award represents). This is likely to result in fairly lengthy lists of resources that may be useful in gathering the most useful perspectives and information on the conflict.

• Use a general search engine (like Google or Yahoo!) to search for more specific information about labor relations and workers' rights, as well as Jobs With justice's  "Justice for Janitors" campaign. Name three people involved in the campaign and what they are doing as a part of their work efforts.
• Locate a newspaper or periodical website with search capabilities. Try to locate three articles pertaining to your conflict.

You will probably be initially overwhelmed with large numbers of "hits" that are completely unrelated to the Justice for Janitors campaign specifically. For example, you might find a great deal of irrelevant information about David Justice, the professional baseball player, or information about a distributor for janitorial supplies called Justice Janitorial Supplies. The simplest way to get around the problem is to find entries that are clearly on-topic, and then click on the "similar pages" link located at the end of each Web page hit if you are using Google or Yahoo!. (You can scan the resulting lists, repeating the process again and again.) You can also look for "buzzwords" or formal keywords that describe your topic more accurately and uniquely. For example, you might find that virtually every article on the conflict makes some reference to either the Union Summer internship program, Bread and Roses (a feature-length film inspired by the campaign), or the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the national labor union spearheading the campaign.

In many cases, it will also be worth your while to use the advanced or power search features that most quality search systems make available. Here, for example, you can use "boolean" logic to search (workers OR rights OR "justice for janitors" OR strike OR "fair treatment") AND (conflict OR dispute OR protest). You may also be able to browse or search by keywords. With Yahoo! you could, for example, select Business and Economy, then Labor, then Organizations. In CRInfo, you can do the same thing with a set of resources specific to conflict resolution.

As you find quality resources, you can save the Web links to those resources on your Internet "bookmarks" or "favorites" lists. You can also save or print useful resources, while ordering publications from online or neighborhood bookstores. You should also remember that the Internet is accessible worldwide. While there is considerable variation in Internet access, there are often viable options for connecting to the Internet, even in remote, less "developed" regions of the country and world.

One key to making any search system work is an understanding of the vocabulary that people use to describe the information that you're looking for. (You should expect to find significant numbers of people who use different words — and the same words in different ways — than you do.) Thus, the first step is to figure out how to translate your vocabulary into the vocabulary used by others. You might find that the acronym "J4J" used by many members and labor activists is also an acronym for another organization called Japanese for Justice. Modifying your search terms to exclude information about Japan may be one way to reduce the number of irrelevant "hits." You could use advanced search options from the site to search all the articles on the J4J campaign, excluding the keyword "Japanese" (usually, the search engines provide specific examples of how to exclude certain keywords from your search that are specific to that particular site's search capabilities).

Additionally, different people and countries may have different vocabularies to talk about janitors' rights. For example, activists may refer to the wider workers' rights issue in terms of "living wage" or "corporate responsibility." Other groups may discuss the conflict in terms of "institutional racism," or Hispanic activists may refer to "Justicia," the Spanish word for justice (Spanish is frequently used to discuss, advertise, present, and disseminate information about the campaign, since many of the janitorial workers are Hispanic). Failure to pay attention to these vocabulary differences can easily leave you with just one side of a multifaceted story.

You can also use the Internet's free translation services (such as Babelfish) to find foreign language versions of your key search terms. You can then use the same services to perform initial translations of any pages that you might find. While these automatic, computer-generated translations leave much to be desired, they should still be good enough (when combined with accompanying graphics) to let you make an initial determination about whether a particular page is likely to be useful. For example, a foreign language search might yield a number of pages containing Spanish-language descriptions of worker-management conflicts. However, your initial automatic translation might quickly reveal that many of the pages do not cover the specific information you are seeking. In the midst of these inappropriate pages, however, you are likely to find references to genuinely useful material, such as a previously unknown project taking place in another city or region. You might then decide to contact a local translator or one of the Web's many human-based translation services to translate the pages. The nuances involved in conflict-related materials are subtle enough to make reliance upon poor-quality translations dangerous.

• From the main page of the search engine, see if you can find advanced search techniques to eliminate unwanted "hits" or otherwise fine-tune your search to find exactly what you are looking for.
• Find and list any special vocabulary that those working in or around the conflict use to describe the conflict parties or particular individuals or personalities associated with the conflict, campaigns or policies relevant to the conflict, or perhaps buzzwords or other key terms used to describe the conflict.
• Did you come across any websites written in a foreign language? Try to use one of the translation websites to convert the content from the foreign language to English (or perhaps another in which you are fluent). Were you able to find important information that you would have otherwise overlooked?

Probably the best place to start your background investigation would be with a search for "encyclopedia-type" information on workers' rights. While you can get some of this information from traditional print sources, online searching is likely to be faster, easier, and more up-to-date. In addition to providing general background information on the conflict, this exercise will also identify a large fraction of the more detailed keywords that you might wish to search. For example, you can expect to find the names of key cities, political leaders, or notable geographic features that are used to describe the conflict (like Denver, Colorado, where the Justice for Janitors program began), that may aid you in your search efforts.

Once you have gotten the local or national perspective on workers' rights struggles, you may wish to find different locales — or perhaps even countries — with which you can compare these perspectives. To assess how different countries interpret the conflicts between workers and management, you might want to try the pre-organized menu items that many general search engines provide. For this conflict, a good place to begin would be the Regional keyword categories on the front page of Yahoo!. This section is sure to provide an astonishing amount of information on any region including, for example, lists of online newspapers, cultural information, city guides and maps, links to government agencies, local e-mail directories, travel information, and information about communications and Internet access. You might then want to look at online newspapers from regions of the country who are represented by the campaign. You might want to start with newspapers published in your native language, and then move on to foreign language newspapers (see below) to fill in obvious information gaps. The key is to find news sources that are looking at the conflict from all perspectives.

You might then want to do a systematic search for organizations involved in workers' rights and organizing efforts in the area. While this is unlikely to yield a complete list of such organizations, it is likely to identify a number of well-connected organizations (such as ACORN.org, HOTROC.org, and SEIU.org), which can provide you with the information you need in order to start exploring the network of people working on the problem. E-mail, telephone calls, and faxes to contacts in these organizations are likely to yield information about the activities of each organization, along with suggestions for others who should be part of your contact tree.

Assignment:

• Try to find and list additional organizations that are actively involved in the conflict.
• Try to find similar conflict resolution efforts going on in other regions of the country or the world.
• Find the names and e-mail addresses of three people you may want to contact about your research questions.
  

Do you feel comfortable with your Web search skills? If not, return to those assignments you feel you still need work on by returning to Page 1 or Page 2. If you feel you are now an Internet search expert, you are ready to evaluate your results.