IIGS™ Newsletter - September/October 1999
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IIGS™ Newsletter - September/October 1999
The Internet is a powerful research tool, but you must know how to use it. The key to using the Internet is learning how to search.In school we learned at least the rudiments of research. Our teachers took us to the library and taught us how to search for information. If you think about it, the Internet is just a big warehouse of a library.
New Internet users might be overwhelmed by the information they access. Getting 100,000 hits for your subject is a bit daunting. Or, as occasionally happens, you type a word into a search engine and it returns "0" hits. Either way, you're left wondering why the rest of the world thinks the Internet is so wonderful.
There are number of excellent resources on the Net to help you learn how to search.
Robert Harris has two very good web pages designed to help college students learn how to search via the Net. The first page is
Internet Search Tips and Strategies Harris explains the differences between keyword searches and phrase searches. He discusses concept searches and explains how to formulate a boolean search.
His second page is
Evaluating Internet Research Sources He advises researchers to "know what you're looking for" and to think about your search before starting out.
Harris suggests that researchers look to see if their sources contain the following information:
- author's name
- author's title or position
- author's organizational affiliation
- date of page creation or version
- author's contact information
- some of the indicators of information quality which he lists on the page
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 2, New York
EPA Library Tipsheet #B6 offers the "Top Ten Basic Internet Search Tips" which include advising searchers to check their spelling.EPA Tip #10: Caveat Surfer. Remember that the Internet has plenty of champagne and snake oil.
The EPA site also offers the
Top Ten Advanced Internet Search Tips Lyndon State College has a whole page,
Searching and Evaluating Internet Resources , of wonderful links to web sites which teach you how to search and how to evaluate what you find.The
A1 Website Developers UK Ltd is an interesting page with links to geographically specific search engines, especially European. It also lists domain codes and provides search tips.