This tutorial gives an overview of secondary information sources and services that allow us to find and locate required primary sources, with an emphasis on open access systems and academic, scholarly, scientific and technical information.
Primary information sources include these days
- billions of public access WWW pages that include text as well as images and multimedia
- thousands of discussion groups based on electronic mail, Usenet, the WWW or combinations of these
- millions of books
- thousands of electronic journals with millions of articles
- open archives/repositories set up and maintained by scientific organizations
Pointing out a selection of interesting ones for a general audience is not feasible or meaningful, in view of the huge volume. This brings us to the secondary sources that help us by creating some order in the expanding information landscape. The secondary sources include
- some general, horizontal subject directories guiding us to WWW sites
- more specialized, vertical subject directories guiding us to WWW sites in some specific subject area
- general, horizontal search engines that lead us to WWW pages, such as Google Web Search, MSN Web Search, Search Yahoo, Ask; some offer categorization and clustering of results on similar subjects, to cope with the classical problem in information retrieval of ambiguity of meaning of words in a query, such as Mooter and Wisenut
- several more specialized systems to search through open archives/repositories, such as Scirus, OAIster and more recently Google Scholar
- meta-WWW-search engines that rely on existing general WWW search engines and that combine and merge search results; remarkable among these is Vivisimo which offers categorization of results to cope with the classical problem in information retrieval of ambiguity of meaning of words in a query
- several systems to find information, which offer categorization plus graphical visualization of search results, such as Kartoo and Grokker
- several databases of booksellers that offer bibliographic descriptions of books and related information, such as Amazon, and of course the book databases/catalogues of many libraries, such as the Library of Congress and the British Library
- several open access meta-search systems that allow us to search through several bookshop-databases in one action
- a few databases that allow even full-text searches of the contents of a selection of books, such as Amazon and Google Book Search
- a few general, horizontal open access databases with search engines that allow us to find article titles in most areas of science and technology, such as Infotrieve, Ingenta, Scirus, and most recently Google Scholar
- many vertical search engines / databases that allow us to find articles and other documents in some specific domain of science, such as the open access systems Medline for biomedical science and related areas, and Eric for educational science and for library and information science
- more specialised search engines to find images on the WWW, such as the open access Google Image Search
- directories and databases of scholarly open access journals and articles, for instance the DOAJ
- a database and search engine to find Usenet newsgroups and articles, Google Groups,
- current awareness services that alert users when a new document has become available that corresponds well with the user profile stored with the system; for public access WWW pages, Google Alert offers this service
- a few systems that allow citation searching besides subject searching as an alternative method to find information, such a the Web of Science, Scopus and the open access Google Scholar
 
Looking into the future we can hope for systems that offer
- better guidance in formulating queries, in particular to cope with the problems associated with using human natural language to express information needs
- better automatic subject categorization of database contents and search results
- more and better visualization of database contents and search results, to guide searching
- better and more standardized APIs of search systems, so that they can be incorporated more efficiently in federated search systems
 
In view of the limited time that is available, participants can express their personal interest, so that the presentation can focus on a selection of the topics mentioned above.
 
More information is available through the WWW:
about the author:
http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/professional/index.html
tutorial materials already available:
http://www.vub.ac.be/BIBLIO/nieuwenhuysen/courses/chapters/

 

Back