1. WISER Humanities: Quality Information on the Internet Johanneke Sytsema Linguistics Subject Consultant Johanneke.sytsema@ouls.ox.ac.uk Judy Reading Reader Services Judy.reading@ouls.ox.ac.uk

2. 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

3. Web basics Organisation Size Scope Invisible web

4. Wikipedia on “The deep web”

5. Invisible or deep web Subscription content Private sites (eg registration or log-in protected) Dynamic content – returned from a query or completed form Unlinked content File types which can’t be searched by search engines eg multimedia files. PDF used to be unavailable

6. Primary Search tools Search engines –General – Google –Specific Google Scholar (Oxford full text links) –Google Blog Search to search blogs –OpenDOAR www.opendoar.org to search repositorieswww.opendoar.org Meta search engines – crawlers Gateways - Intute Reference tools - OxLip

7. Search engines Major players –Google (US and UK versions) –Google Scholar (www.scholar.google.com)www.scholar.google.com –Yahoo search (www.yahoo.com or co.uk)www.yahoo.com –Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com or co.uk)www.ask.com

8. Search Engines Advantages 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

9. Google Worth looking in the Advanced search and Advanced Search Tips to see what Google offers. You can search: for a particular resource or kind of information such as books, blogs, images or news Within a particular site or create a customised search engine searching sites you select Sites which link to a particular site or are similar to a site The order of search terms matters and you can repeat key words to influence what you retrieve Normally Google automatically truncates and combines with “and”. Phrase searching (using quotation marks) very useful for making searches specific Results are ranked for relevance through a secret formula which includes the popularity of pages

10. Google Scholar You need the Virtual Private Network set up to gain access to all Oxford subscription full-text if using a home PC or laptop Make sure you have Oxford selected in your preferences so the links to Oxford holdings works.

11. Google Scholar Advantages: quick and easy to use, full-text searching, cited by links, huge general resource linked to local holdings as well as full-text if available Disadvantages: not comprehensive – most recent and oldest material may be missing, doesn’t have the full functionality of subscription bibliographic databases eg can’t mark from a list or save searches to combine sets, no controlled vocabulary Use Advanced search options and read through the search tips and help offered to make the most of Google Scholar Getting better all the time – may provide “good enough” quick results but not (yet?) sufficient for a thorough literature search

12. Google Scholar Use ‘exact phrase’ Use ‘with at least one of the words’ Use ‘Exclude the words’ Set preferences to choose Oxford full text option Not comprehensive at all Cannot sort by date

13. Google Scholar 613 hits Link to Oxford Full Text

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

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

16. Meta Search engines (1) A tool that searches across a number of individual search engines retrieving the ‘top’ results from each Clusty (www.clusty.com) – ranks results according to subjectwww.clusty.com Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com) – links to the top 10 hits in other search engineswww.metacrawler.com Dogpile (www.dogpile.com) – no ranking; searches by ‘exact phrase’www.dogpile.com

17. Clusty

18. Metacrawler: compare top ten results in Google, Yahoo, Ask

19. Meta-Search engines (2) Advantages Search across a number of engines using a single interface Ranking according to subject (Clusty) Compare top ten results of Google, Yahoo, Ask in Metacrawler Can save time searching More of the web searched Duplicates removed

20. Meta-Search engines (3) Disadvantages Difficult to limit searches Search engine coverage: Metacrawler: Google, Yahoo, Ask CLusty: Ask, Open Directory, Gigablast and others

21. Directories/indexes/Gateways Lists of web resources grouped together in a structured manner INTUTE http://www.intute.ac.uk/ subject based web resources for education and research (part of RDN Resource Discovery Network)http://www.intute.ac.uk/ British Academy Portal http://www.britac.ac.uk/portal/index.html http://www.britac.ac.uk/portal/index.html (humanities and social sciences, academic) INFOMINE scholarly internet resource collections http://infomine.ucr.edu/http://infomine.ucr.edu/

22. 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

23. INTUTE

24. 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

25. INTUTE offers RSS feeds You will be automatically updated when new quality sites in your subject area are added to the database

26. Gateways STELLA: Gateway produced by Glasgow University –English and Scottish language links –/www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SES LL/STELLA/links.htm Refers to organisations, gateways, text archives No search Points to useful resources

27. 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?

28. example http://home.wanadoo.nl/ mpaginae/http://home.wanadoo.nl/ mpaginae/ Aim of this site? Who made it? When was it made? What can be searched?

29. example www.kb.nl This site in English About us Copyright & colofon

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

31. This presentation will be available from the WISER Presentations Archive www.ouls.ox.ac.uk OULS HomeOULS Home > E-resources > Information skills and induction > WISER > WISER Presentations ArchiveE-resourcesInformation skills and inductionWISER Presentations Archive