Skills in Information Retrieval Topic 8 Skills in Information Retrieval

8. Skills in Information Retrieval Learning Objectives: At the end of the Chapter, you should be able to: identify the various information sources i.e. OPAC, electronic databases and Internet apply the author, title, author-title, subject and keyword search strategies systematically apply search strategies to the following databases: OPAC, e-book and, e-journal

OPAC Search Strategies

Searching Electronic Databases Searching E-Books (Electronic book) To conduct a search for a full-text online book, we can use “Ebrary”. The easiest search - use keywords search. Reading an e-book is different from reading a printed book. One way to read the e-book would be to view the “Table of contents” and simply select the topics

Searching for Information on the Internet The information on the Internet is not like in a library where all items are identified and can be traced by the catalogues and indexes. There are millions of files on the web & anyone can publish on the Internet. There is no control or filtering of the information published. Searching the web therefore is a challenge and you need to develop a search strategy.

Search Strategies In searching for information on the web you do not try to retrieve all the relevant documents on a topic of interest. Just select a few key and relevant documents.

Internet Search Tools Address - type the URL Surf or browse Search Engines (single search engines) Meta Search Engines - submit a search across to many search engines at the same time.e.g. Mamma or Dogpile Subject Directories/Subject Gateways - websites are organised into a hierarchy of categories Libraries on the net Databases - Other than the subscribed ones there are free databases of reference material on specialised topics Usenet Newsgroup - join an email discussion group or a usergroup

Question? End of Topic 8