ABOUT

Renaissance is a research website that advocates "cultural literacy" by using the "Library of Congress Subject Headings" (LCSH) as a thesaurus for Internet searching. LCSH represents most of the knowlege of modern societies. Imploring LCSH as a research tool to locate information greatly increases one's chances of identifying and retrieving relevant information on a given topic. While one may still use " free text", full text", or "keyword descriptors", which may be found in the index of a book on a given subject, it is important to remember that a LCSH search almost always produces more relevant results than a random free text approach. One must be cognizant that Internet research is distinct from library research (focusing on library-bound resources) and commercial database research (usually focusing on journal articles). Even though many commercial databases are delivered through the Internet, and some libraries purchase access to databases on behalf of their patrons, searching such databases is generally not considered “Internet research”. Finally, it should also be recognized that Internet research is distinguished from scientific research which is a defined and rigorous process which may be expressed either qualitatively and/or quantitatively.