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Homeland Security Research: Home

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Google Scholar Search

Note: You will need to change the Scholar setting to U. of Denver to retrieve DU content from off-campus.

Google Scholar Search

Google Books Search

Google Book Search

Google Web Power Search

An excellent way to search the Web for primary sources. Examples:

site:un.org "human trafficking"

site:gob.mx "trafficking in persons"

site:un.org "smuggling of migrants"

site:al "smuggling of migrants"

Google Web Search

Databases Related to Homeland Security

US Department of Homeland Security

You can use Google power searching to find documents within DHS or any of the subordinate agencies. Examples:

Google Power Searching: State Documents

Searching U.S. state web sites presents to challenges. Originally the .us top-level domain was used for state and local governments. However, over time, the .us domain was assigned to other entities within the United States that were not government related. Originally states were all assigned a URL pattern within the .us domain like this: state.xx.us, where xx is the two-letter postal code for the state. Thus state.co.us would be the Colorado state site, and state.wi.us would be the Wisconsin site. These patterns proved to not be popular with many states, being too difficult for the public to remember and difficult to market. Many states secured other domains for their official content. Colorado uses colorado.gov for its official entry site, and Wisconsin uses wisconsin.gov. However, most states still have a substantial amount of content on the older state.xx.us sites.

If you wanted to find the phrase "homeland security" on Colorado state sites that are in PDF format, you would need to perform two searches:

Google Power Searching: Local Documents

Information regarding homeland security, emergency management, and related topics can also be found on local governmental web sites. Typically these are county and city-level sites. Counties were assigned URLs like this:

co.[county].xx.us - where co stands for county, and xx stands for the two-letter state postal code.

Cities were assigned URLs like this:

ci.[city].xx.us, where ci stand for city or place name, and xx stands for the two-letter state postal code.

Local governments, meaning counties, cities, and other places such as villages, share a similar URL situation to that of states. Counties were originally assigned a URL structure under the .us domain. A county such as Arapahoe County, Colorado was assigned co.arapahoe.co.us. The first “co” here refers to “county”, whereas the second “co” refers to Colorado. This can be seen very clearly in the case of Walworth County, Wisconsin: co.walworth.wi.us. In these two cases the counties have opted not to deviate from their original domain assignment.

The best starting point is simply to "Google" the county. Denver is both a city and a county, and it's primary site is denvergov.org. But content also resides on ci.denver.co.us. Boulder County uses bouldercounty.org, but also has content on co.boulder.co.us. The city of Boulder has content on bouldercolorado.gov, but also on ci.boulder.co.us.

Reference Librarian

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Christopher C. Brown
Contact:
University Libraries

University of Denver

(303) 871-3404