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Unit 2. Learning to research on the Web



Cyberspace is not like your library

Librarians have a weird sense of humour. This is now an old joke: The Internet is like a library with no catalogue where all the books get up and move themselves every night... This was the state of the Internet up until 1995 or thereabouts.

The new joke is: The Internet is like a library with a thousand catalogues, none of which contains all the books and all of which classify the books in different categories-arid the books still move around every night. The problem now is not that of " finding anything" but finding a particular thing. When your search term in one of the popular search engines brings back 130, 000 hits, you still wonder if the one thing you're looking for will be among them.

This can be an enormous problem when you're trying to do serious research on the Internet. Too much information is almost worse than too little, because it takes so much time to sort through it to see if there's anything useful. The rest of this section will give you some pointers to help you become an effective Internet researcher.

Get to know the reference sources on the Internet

Finding reference material on the Web can be a lot more difficult than walking into the Reference Room in your local library

The subject - classified Web directories described below will provide you with your main source of links to reference materials on the Web. In addition, many public and academic libraries, like the Internet Public Library, have put together lists of links to Web sites, categorised by subject. The difficulty is finding Web sites that contain the same kind of substantive content you'd find in a library.

Understand how search engines work

Search engines are software tools that allow a user to ask for a list of Web pages containing certain words or phrases from an automated search index. The automated search index is a database containing some or all of me words appearing on the Web pages that have been indexed. The search engines send out a software program known as a spider, crawler or robot. The spider follows hyperlinks from page to page around the Web, gathering and bringing information back to the search engine to be indexed.

Most search engines index all texts found on a Web page, except for words too common to index, such as " a, and, in, to, the" and so on. When a user submits a query, the search engine looks for Web pages containing the words, combinations, or phrases asked for by the user. Engines may be programmed to took for an exact match or a close match (for example, the plural of the word submitted by the user). They may rank the hits as to how close the match is to the words submitted by the user.

One important thing to remember about search engines is this: once the engine and the spider have been programmed, the process is totally automated. No human being examines the information returned by the spider to see what subject it might bs about or whether the words on the Web page adequately reflect the actual main point of the page.

Another important fact is that ail the search engines are different, fhey index differently and treat users' queries differently (how nice! ). The purden is on the searcher to learn how to use the features of each search, engine.

Task 2.1. Read an excellent article about search engines:

Searching the Internet Part I: Sorne Sasid Considerations and Automated Search indexes in IhterNlC News, September 1998, by Jack Solock.

http.//rs.internic.net/nic-support/nicnews/archive/september96/enduser.html

Bookmarks or favourites

Before you start a research session, make a new folder in your bookmarks or favourites area and set that folder as the one to receive new bookmark additions. You might name it with the current date, so you later can identify in which research session the bookmarks were made. Remember you can make a bookmark for a page you haven't yet visited by holding the mouse over the link and getting the popup menu (by either pressing the mouse button or right clicking, depending on what flavour. computer you have) to " Add bookmark" or " Add to favourites." Before you sign off your research session, go back and weed out any bookmarks which turned out to be uninteresting so you don't have a bunch of irrelevant material to deal with later. Later you can move these bookmarks around into different folders as you organise information for writing your paper-find out how to do that in your browser.

Printing from the browser

Sometimes you'll want to print information from a Web site. The main thing to remember is to make sure the Page Setup is set to print out the page title, URL, and the date. You'll be unable to use the material if you can't remember later where it came from.

" Saving as" a file

Know how to temporarily save the contents of a Web page as a file on your hard drive or a floppy disk and later open It In your browser by using the " tile open" feature. You can save the page you're currently viewing or one which is hyperlinked from that page, from the " File" menu of the popup menu accessed by the mouse held over the hyperlink.

Copying and pasting to a word processor

You can take quotes from Web pages by opening up a Word processing document and keeping it open while you use your browser. When you find text you want to save, drag the mouse over it and " copy" it, then open up your word processing document and " paste" II Be sure to also copy and paste the URL and page title, and to record the date, so you know where the information came from

Learn how search syntax works

Search syntax is a set of rules describing how users can query the database being searched. Sophisticated syntax makes for a better search, one where the items retrieved are mostly relevant to the searcher's need and important items are not missed. It allows a user to look for combinations of terms, exclude other terms, look for various forma of a word, include synonyms, search for phrases rather than single words. The main tools of search syntax are these:

Wildcards and truncation

This involves substituting symbols for certain letters of a word so that the search engine will retrieve items with any letter in that spot in the word. The syntax may allow a symbol in the middle of a word (wildcard) or only at the end of the word (truncation). This feature makes it easier to search for related word groups, like " woman" and " women" by using a wildcard such as " wom*n." Truncation can be useful to search for a group of words like " invest, investor, investors, investing, investment, investments" by submitting " invest*" rather than typing in all those terms separated by OR's. The only problem is that " invest*" will also retrieve " investigate, investigated, investigator, investigation, investigating." The trick, then is to' combine terms with an AND such as " invest*" AND " stock* or bond* or financ* or money" to try and narrow your retrieved set to the kind of documents you're looking for.

Phrase searching

Many concepts are represented by a phrase rather than a single word. In order to successfully search for a term like " library school" it's important that the search engine allows syntax for phrase searching. Otherwise, instead of getting documents about library schools you could be getting documents about school libraries or documents- where the word " library" and " school" both appear but have nothing to do with a library school.

Capitalisation

When searching for proper names, search syntax that will distinguish capital from lower case letters will help narrow the search. In other cases, you would want to make sure the search engine isn't looking for a particular pattern of capitalisation, and many search engines let you choose which of these options to use.

Field searching

All database records are divided up into fields. Almost all search engines in CD-ROM or online library products and the more sophisticated Web search engines allow users to search for terms appearing in a particular field. This can help immensely when you're looking for a very specific item. Say that you're looking for a psychology paper by a professor from the University of Michigan and ail you remember about the paper is that it had something about Freud and Jung in its title. If you think it may be on the Web, you can do a search in Alta Vista, searching for " Freud" AND " Jung" and limit your search to the " umich.edu" domain, which gives you a pretty good chance of finding it, if it's there.

Make sure you know what content you're searching

The content of the database will affect your search strategy and the search syntax you use to retrieve documents. Some of the different databases you'll encounter in your library and online research are:

Things you're not likely to find on the Web for free:

· encyclopaedias (the CD-ROM versions are selling too well)

· index and abstract services (very labour - intensive to produce but are essential to a scholarly researcher looking for journal articles and therefore very profitable to sell to libraries)

· books that are still under copyright

· full -text non-fiction books on scholarly topics

· most scholarly journal articles (this is changing)

· pre-1994 (pre-Web) magazine and newspaper articles (this may change)

If you look at the list of what's not on the Web, it covers about 90% of the contents of a college library's collection, both the reference and the circulating collection. It's apparent that researchers still have to spend a good portion of their research time in the library rather than on the Web.

Questions to Unit 2: 1. Do you agree with the opinion that too much information is almost worse? 2. How to print from the browser? 3, How does search syntax work? 4. What do wildcards and truncation mean? 5. What things are you hardly to find on the Web for free?

 


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