Web-based information
Almost all Library PCs can be used to search the Internet, and most of the Library's electronic resources (books, journals and other databases) are web based. This means most resources can be used off campus. Access to Library resources usually requires authentication using your DS username and password.
Using the Internet
As with any research, before you start, take time to analyse what it is you are looking for and how it can be succinctly broken down into keywords - not forgetting synonyms, including for example the different terminologies of British and US English. Be clear what level of information you want - eg introductory overviews; academic surveys; practical applications. Review your results regularly, looking out for clues to help pursue any new lines of enquiry you come across eg if you discover new ways of describing the topic.
Remember, anyone anywhere can post information on the web - and therefore what you find may be biased, unreliable (or wrong), out-of-date, overly simplistic, etc. Traditional library materials generally have an element of quality control : most publishers carefully guard their reputations and librarians tend to select material they believe will be suitable for their user community, so don’t underestimate our SUPrimo search service as a starting point, both for searching for books and also for searching for journal articles (using the Articles + Databases tab). Electronic information traced through the Library catalogue (e-books, e-journals, government reports), or databases subscribed to by the Library will tend to be more academically respectable than that retrieved through search engines.
Beyond the Library Catalogue, the following sources will tend to point to quality material:
JORDANHILL LIBRARY WEB PAGES
The Library’s Subject Resources pages gather together all the library’s electronic subscription services for subjects taught on campus; in some cases they also lead to sets of links to key organisations in a field – see particularly “Internet sites” under the headings Children’s Literature, Community Education, Counselling, Education, Music, Sport. Although the range of siteslisted is limited, many will link to further useful sources.
INTERNET GATEWAYS
The following sites give access to web-based resources selected for their relevance to the needs of students and professionals in particular subject areas:
- INTUTE ("the very best Web resource for education and research")
(updating of Intute ceases July 2010; the existing database will remain searchable until at least Summer 2011) - PINAKES is an extensive listing of subject gateways
- OAISTER may help locate freely available material in “Institutional repositories” – (such as our own ‘Strathprints’ service, – often preprints of academic papers.
SEARCH ENGINES
UK SITES - use www.google.co.uk rather than www.google.com
PHRASE SEARCHING - use Advanced Search option. You can combine and/or exclude further search words.
DOCUMENT FORMATS – Advanced Search enables you to search only PDFs (ie facsimiles of paper-based reports) which may more rapidly retrieve in-depth documents on your subject – at File Type specify Adobe Acrobat PDF on the drop down menu at the extreme right.
DATE – Advanced Search -restrict to eg past year, or specify eg 2006-08 using the numeric range option.
“WHERE YOUR KEYWORDS SHOW UP” – use this feature of Advanced Search to limit searching to e.g. just the titles of documents, which may reduce retrieval and increase relevance.
PICTURES AND GRAPHICS -click Images on the main Google home page.
Google uses a ranking procedure, displaying first those sites which boast many links from other sites – an implicit recommendation on the basis that others found the site worth pointing to.
GOOGLE SCHOLAR indexes academic information on the web. Some of the material is freely available in full-text but most is limited to an abstract of the full content – library staff can advise whether fulltext may be available through the library’s electronic services or through inter-library loan.
GOOGLE GUIDE outlines further possibilities.
IXQUICK automatically retrieves UK sites first (also contains UK and international telephone directory/address search and a picture (image) search).
Don’t forget to record URLs of sites you find particularly valuable – it’s not always easy to remember how you first found them if you want to revisit at a later date.
Evaluating Internet Sites
Since anyone, anywhere, can put any information up on their web page, it is particularly important to think critically about the reliability of sites you come across; you might consider
- does the data make reference to books, articles or statistical data from established publishers?
- is there a home page or parent document to help identify the source of the information? In the absence of any specific links to these, truncating the URL may help (remove characters after the final '/'), or follow any "about this site" link.
- when was the data prepared? Has it been updated? Is it important that it should be up-to-date?
- does the site have explicit quality-control mechanisms (eg peer-review)?
- is it hosted by a reputable organization? Is authorship clear and is an e-mail address provided to facilitate clarification?
- what is the intended audience and purpose, eg if for the classroom, the information may be inappropriate for a dissertation; if for research students, possibly not much use for children.
- is the information consistent within itself, or is it full of contradictions and non-sequiturs?
- corroboration. Have you found any other sources which generally take a similar position?
- is it easy to navigate with its own index? Is the text clearly written? When was the site last updated?
- does the site have an obvious slant or target audience, eg to promote the interests of a particular commercial company? The web address itself may give an initial clue - com. or co. suggesting a company ; org. suggesting a public sector organization; ac. edu. or sch. suggesting education. The last part of the address is often a country code (eg de for Germany, fi for Finland).
- are there a range of functioning links to related sites (and/or a bibliography) suggesting that the writer is comparatively well informed?
- were you referred to the site by a reputable source or did you com on it by chance?
- Is the source well-designed? Well-designed sources do not always have good content, but a poorly designed resource is more likely to have bad content.
- does the site have biographical data about the author which would tend to suggest he/she is well informed?
For more of this see Evaluating internet research sources by R Harris