[sbfinley]

Responding to another thread on the board, I'm finally motivated to ask a question I've been meaning to for a little while now. With as many researchers as we have on the board, it would be nice if some of them can provide their "best practices." I'm not a professional historian or researcher. I'm just a guy with a 9-5 who likes to research topics occasionally from the comfort of my couch. I graduated college over 20 years ago and my well worn copy of SABR's "How to do Baseball Research" is woefully out of date. Search engines like Google seemed to have amazingly regressed in the past 5-10 years and while it used to be easy to find links to 1st hand resources like newspaper articles with the popular search engines, they now seem to be bloated with AI overviews and links to information that barely even rhymes with my original search. A previous job provided me with JSTOR access, which was helpful at the time so I'm considering maybe getting access to that database again. At times I've had Newspaper.com subscriptions, but I've occasionally found it lacking.

So I'm curious. What resources are you guys using? Where do you normally start your search? Any helpful search tips/tricks?

Thanks all and happy collecting!