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Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Finding quality information on the Internet Kate Alderson-Smith Oxford University Library Services Oxford University Library Services – Information Skills Training Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Session Objectives An overview of the types of web search tools available Review of the functionality and focus of different search tools Summary of helpful search techniques Review evaluation techniques for judging results Introduction to the principles of citing eresources Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Web basics Size Organisation Scope What are you really searching? Deep/Invisible web Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Primary search tools Search engines General – google Specific – google scholar Meta-search engines Directories / gateways Reference Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Search Engines Database of web resources collected by robots/spiders/web crawler Size and scope Interface and ease of searching Ranking of results Advance searching functionality Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Search Engines Major players Google [US and UK versions] Google scholar [www.scholar.google.com] Yahoo search [www.yahoo.com or co.uk] Ask Jeeves [www.ask.com or co.uk] Teoma [www.teoma.com] N.B. Many search engines use other engine’s databases alltheweb & Lycos = Yahoo Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Search Engines Advantages: index a large proportion of the public web word for word indexing easy to use and available Disadvantages databases created automatically no quality control different advance searching techniques public pages only huge number of ‘hits’ generated Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Search techniques: Review Too many results? Add more concepts, link terms, search in a particular field i.e. title, limit to UK pages – advance searching options Too few results? Broaden your search terms, add alternate phrases, try a metasearch engine Are you searching in the right place? Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Meta-search engines a tool that searches across a number of individual search engines retrieving the ‘top’ results from each Vivisimo [www.visisimo.com] Clusty [www.clusty.com] Metacrawler [www.metacrawler.com] Dogpile [www.dogpile.com] Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Meta-search engines Advantages search across a number of engines using a single interface can save time searching more of the web searched duplicates removed Disadvantages difficult to limit searches search engine coverage Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Directories/indexes Lists of web resources group together in a structured manner Open directory [general] Yahoo [general] WWW Virtual Library [general/academic] British Academy Portal [academic] Infomine [academic] Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Directories/indexes Advantages created by people who have evaluated the sites subject structure allowing browsing smaller and more manageable than engines general and academic directories Disadvantages browsing can return a long list of sites difficult to identify what category you need to search in indexed by title rather than word-for-word Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Gateways Classified list of resources focused on one particular subject area. Mainly created by professionals for the HE community. Available from the RDN For Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Health and Life sciences, Physical Sciences, Arts and creative industries, and Geography & Environment. Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Gateways Advantages: contains only high quality sites detailed subject coverage focused on resources of value to the academic community Disadvantages: often very subject specific general/popular sites may not be included specific results retrieve very small or no hits Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Searching techniques: Review Choose the correct tool Use phrase searching with “” Be specific, use unique keywords if possible Link keywords: AND, OR, NOT, –, + Truncation or wildcard characters * or ? Use advanced searching to limit results Use a variety of tools to locate material Evaluate results Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Evaluating results When? Check currency, when was it produced? Who? Who is responsible for the information? Why? Has it been published on the internet? Where? Where is the page situated? What? What value is of to you? Workshops in Information Skills and Electronic Resources Citing web resources No agreed standard for citing e-resources Include as much information as possible: author or editor, date. Title of the web page [online]. Place of publication, publisher. Available from: URL [date accessed] Cite e-material in the same style as you would printed material Be consistent