There are plenty of resources you can use to find information about the city of Chico and the surrounding area.  Below you will find a guide to many of these resources.  Many use a single search bar, the same way Google does, although you will see that ProQuest Newsstand’s and LexisNexis Academic’s search interfaces are a bit more robust.  Simply input one or more of the search strings you developed above into the search bar and take a look at the search results.

You can type any one of the search strings you developed in section one into the search bar(s) of the websites and database(s) you are searching, and you will receive a set of results.  If you substitute one or more words, you change the search string, and you will receive a different set of results.  Substituting terms in this manner typically results in broader or narrower sets of results, depending on how broad or specific the terms you use in your search are.

For example, searching for "energy use AND Chico" will get you articles about energy use in Chico. Searching for "energy use AND Northern California" will broaden your search results to include other cities in Northern California beyond Chico.

For this section, find an article relating to your topic, from either the city of Chico or the surrounding area, or from another city.  In the assignment worksheet included in the page of instructions, write down

• The article title
• The author(s)
• If applicable, the name if the journal from which the article came
• The date of publication
• Where the article came from
• The search process you used to find it
  

City of Chico Homepage:
http://www.chico.ca.us/

Links to all sorts of info about Chico including the Municipal Code (our laws), the web pages for this city council (including their meeting minutes), city news and press releases, and more.

Chico Police Department Crime Analysis:
http://www.chico.ca.us/Police/Crime_Analysis/Crime_Analysis_Main.asp

The Crime Analysis section of the police department’s website includes links to crime statistics, maps of crime locations, definitions of crimes, and maps of traffic collision information.

Chico News & Review Newspaper:
http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Home

Covers local community events and news. Use the “Search” box at the upper-right hand corner of the page to search the archives back to 2001.

Chico Enterprise Record Newspaper:
http://www.chicoer.com

Use the Search box at the top of the screen to search recent articles.

Chico Enterprise Record Newspaper archive search:
http://www.chicoer.com/archivesearch

Select “Archives” to search articles back to 1998, however, please note that you will not be able to get the full-text of older articles online.  For articles not available in full-text from the Enterprise Record website, use the Meriam Library’s newspaper microfilm collection on the 2nd floor of the library.  The Library owns all articles in the Enterprise Record from the present all the way back to 1948.

If you need assistance finding the Enterprise Record on microfilm, ask the librarian at the reference desk for help.  The students in the library’s Media & Microform Center (on the 2nd floor of the library) can help you if you need assistance using a microfilm reader.

Having found one or more articles on a local issue, you can now check to see if this issue or a similar issue has been picked up by the national media. ProQuest Newsstand and LexisNexis Academic are both great resources for finding news information at a national level.  You can access both through the Meriam Library ReSEARCH station.  The articles in these databases are from national publications and frequently are not freely available via web search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

To access ProQuest Newsstand or LexisNexis Academic, follow the steps below.  If you use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to access the Internet from off-campus, you can gain access to all the library's databases using your Chico State portal username and password.

• Go to the Meriam Library’s ReSEARCH Station at

http://www.csuchico.edu/library

• Select Databases A-Z from the menus in the center of the screen, and then select either ProQuest Newsstand or LexisNexis Academic from the databases listed.


• This is the interface you will see with ProQuest:

• If you select LexisNexis, select all news towards the bottom of the "search the news" search box. This will take you to the following interface:

• Now enter some search terms and search, based upon the search strategy you devised in section one. You can use any of the limiters in the database interfaces to further narrow your search -- setting a date range or searching for your terms only in the article headline, for example.

Your assignment worksheet, with the following sections filled out:

• section one (constructing a search string)
• section three (information on an article about Chico or the surrounding area, or about another city)

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