WISER Humanities: Quality Information on the Internet Johanneke Sytsema Linguistics Subject Consultant

Aims of the session An overview of the types of web search tools Functionality and Focus of different search tools Summary of helpful search techniques Evaluating results Using gateways

Web basics Organisation Size Scope Invisible web

Primary Search tools Search engines –General – Google –Specific Google Scholar (Oxford full text links) –OpenDOAR Meta search engines – crawlers Gateways - Intute Reference tools - OxLip

Search engines Major players –Google (US and UK versions) –Google Scholar ( –Yahoo search ( or co.uk) –Ask Jeeves ( or co.uk)

Search Engines Advatages Index a large proportion of the public web Word for word indexing Easy to use and available Disadvantages Huge number of hits generated No quality control Different advance searching techniques Public pages only, no databases

Search techniques (1) Too many results? Add more concepts Link terms Search in a particular field i.e. title Limit to UK pages Advance searching options Search for exact phrase using “..”

Search techniques (2) Too few results? Broaden search term Add alternate phrases Try a meta search engine Are you searching in the right place? Have you tried subscription databases?

Meta Search engines A tool that searches across a number of individual search engines retrieving the ‘top’ results from each Clusty ( – ranks results according to subjectwww.clusty.com Metacrawler ( – links to the top 12 hits in other search engineswww.metacrawler.com Dogpile ( – no rankingwww.dogpile.com

Clusty

Meta-Search engines (2) Advantages Search across a number of engines using a single interface Ranking according to subject (Clusty) Can save time searching More of the web searched Duplicates removed Disadvantages Difficult to limit searches Search engine coverage

Directories/indexes/Gateways Lists of web resources grouped together in a structured manner British Academy Portal (humanities and social sciences, academic) INFOMINE scholarly internet resource collections INTUTE subject based web resources for education and research (part of RDN Resource Discovery Network)

British Academy Portal

Directories/indexes/gateways Advantages Created by people who have evaluated the sites Quality resources Subject structure allows browsing Smaller and more manageable than engines Disadvantages Browsing can return a long list of sites Difficult to identify which category to search in Indexed by title rather than word-for-word

INTUTE

Search Example: archeology/papyrology ‘Dead Sea scrolls and Qumran’ contains info and is a gateway to other sites Duke papyrus archive contains information about over 1,300 papyri Great Isaiah Scroll: images, translation and discussion of the text

Gateways STELLA: Gateway produced by Glasgow University –English and Scottish language links –/ LL/STELLA/links.htm Refers to organisations, gateways, text archives No direct search Points to useful resources

Evaluating results When was it produced? Who is responsible for the information? Why has it been published on the Internet? Where is the page situated? What is the value to you?

example mpaginae/ mpaginae/ Aim of this site? Who made it? When was it made? What can be searched?

example This site in English About us Copyright & colofon

Summary For focussed results use Specific search engines Meta-search engines Focus your search strategy For quality results use evaluated resources: Directories Gateways Databases

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