The Library and the Internet: Complementary Research Tools Research Methods and Data College of Advancing Studies Brendan Rapple

6/30/2015 The Library and the Web... A vast amount of material potentially valuable for research is freely available on the web. Confining one’s research material to what libraries purchase is certainly poor research practice.

6/30/2015 Not Easy to Use the Library Today’s library is very challenging due to –the digital revolution –the information explosion –the resultant embarrassment of choice, –the myriad ways to access information. Many libraries point to hundreds of databases. Much database searching is not particularly intuitive. Few databases are as inviting as Google, Amazon, or Netflix.

6/30/2015 Usage of Google People like it: it’s powerful and often effective. Seems easy (perhaps deceptively easy) to use. Still, a common problem is a sole reliance on Google. Consequent neglect of a library’s resources and databases.

6/30/2015 Chronicle of Higher Education (Copyright)

6/30/2015 Is Google Used Efficiently and Effectively? How often is Google’s advanced searching capability utilized?advanced searching How many click on Google’s MORE link which provides more focused searching byMORE Catalogs Directory Images Maps Finance News Patents and a host of other options.

6/30/2015 Google Scholar Though not as focused as many “library” databases, Google Scholar has great size, breadth and cross-disciplinary depth. Types of scholarly material Google Scholar points to include –Peer-reviewed articles –Theses –Books –Abstracts and papers from professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations. Searching preferences may be set to a library’s holdings so that relevant hits will be linked to results. Consult Advanced Scholar Search Tips to increase search accuracy.Advanced Scholar Search Tips

6/30/2015 Google Book Search An initiative to digitize books from a growing number of major libraries (presently 25 in the US, UK, Spain and Germany). Potential number of books to be digitized is vast. Almost all of the U. of Michigan’s over 7,000,000 volumes will be copied. Only digitized books in public domain will be accessible full-text online. Still, hundreds of thousands of books are already freely available full-text. This potent research tool should be known and utilized by all researchers.

6/30/2015 © 1996 Ed Stein

6/30/2015 Google: Not the Only Search Engine Scores and scores of others, including: –Ask.com –Scirus –Yippy –Bing –Exalead –and of course Yahoo!

6/30/2015 Important to Remember that –Different search engines search different parts of the web –They do it in different ways –There are also widely divergent methods of ranking results.

6/30/2015 Capabilities of Different Search Engines Some are good at –finding still and moving images (e.g. Yahoo!Video for video)Yahoo!Video –Multiple search options (e.g. Exalead)Exalead –visual searches (e.g. Search-Cube)Search-Cube –finding blogs (e.g. Technorati for blogs)Technorati –retrieving podcasts (e.g. Podcast Search Engines)Podcast Search Engines –limiting searches to a region or geographically (e.g. Ask)Ask –retrieving sounds (e.g. Findsounds) and so on.Findsounds

6/30/2015 More Search Engines Healia.com -- searches medical info.Healia.com Blogscope.net -- searches blogsBlogscope.net Picsearch --Finds pictures/imagesPicsearch Answers.com – Question and answerAnswers.com Wink.com -- People SearchWink.com

6/30/2015 The following web sites provide useful overviews of search engines and their particular specializations: 1)The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, April 2007The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, April ) Finding Information: Search EnginesFinding Information: Search Engines 3) Tool Kit for the Expert Web SearcherTool Kit for the Expert Web Searcher 4)Search Engine ResourcesSearch Engine Resources 5)Wikipedia List of Search EnginesWikipedia List of Search Engines

6/30/2015 Selective Web Guides Categorized/annotated guides to web sites generally selected by educators. Sites carefully evaluated for accuracy and high quality content. Examples: INFOMINE Intute BUBL LINK LINKhttp://bubl.ac.uk/ Scout Report Archives Report Archiveshttp://scout.wisc.edu/Archives/ IPL2

6/30/2015 Conclusion Scholarly research generally requires strong familiarity with –print and electronic resources purchased by Library –vast amount of quality information and data available for free on the internet. To limit oneself to one type of resource is not good research practice.